The Cost of Getting Lean with Muscle Nerds Luke Leaman

# The Cost of Getting Lean with Muscle Nerds Luke Leaman

**Channel:** Ali Do Is Win
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.transistor.fm/23c00eaf/bdec784c.mp3

Welcome to the Allie Do Is Win podcast, your source for the most transparent and truthful information out there when it comes to your health, hormone optimization, nutrition and fitness needs. I am your host, Allie Weingroff, and I am delivering this information to you guys with a lot of craft and a little bit of class. I hope you enjoy the show as much as I enjoy interviewing the guests on here. I have Luke Lehman back. if you guys don't know who he is by now, I don't know. Like I post every day about him. I mean, what we talk like bi-monthly, I post all about that. I send him penises in the mail. Like we have quite the friendship going here. So, but yeah, there he is. Squishy ding ding. So many of you have followed my journey, which seems to be only wedding related because I think the majority of the time I've been with you guys, we've been prepping for like four different wedding dates, which is a feat in and of itself. But they have seen the transformation that I have made pretty much this year, which is year three of being with you. And I did not really document publicly the beginning stages because I think I was so self-conscious of how I looked. and nobody really posts photos when they feel they look like gross. But now you guys will see those photos that I never posted. And it's actually funny going through the entire Dropbox. And I was like, wow, I really thought I was that fat that time. Okay. But also like what actually goes into achieving the level of leanness that I asked for, which Luke terms dick skin lean, as you guys have seen on Instagram sometimes. So there's a lot of cuss words in our uh uh which mccall episode today so if anyone's around your muffs so i found you or i i learned of you and zoe through our mutual friend todd georgie who was epic on the dance floor at our wedding by the way oh my god he's amazing and he was like you know all the hormone stuff you're getting into you have to meet luke and zoe and i think i just missed you guys you were in new york like a couple months after. And I was like, Oh, why didn't you tell me? And so I'm looking into your stuff. And I was like, Oh my God, this is awesome. Like, I wish I had met you guys. And so 2018, I was like, Oh, they're doing a seminar in Vancouver. I was like, I'm going to go there and I'm going to go all in. And I think I pretty much have gone all in the last three years. And I remember sitting in that seminar and I was like, Oh my God, this is what our industry needs. this is what they do not teach and going to school for exercise science you don't learn how to apply this to real people you just learn this is the krebs cycle which everyone fucking hates and no one can remember but then luke is like this is the krebs cycle and this is why it matters when you have clients who maybe can't handle carbohydrates and this is how you get them to handle it and it was like mind-blowing and i was like i have to become a client because they're the only people that can fix me because everyone thought, you know, you're broken and all that stuff. And I literally was eating like 1100 calories. And I remember, I brought a Tupperware as that person, a Tupperware of ground beef to the seminar, because it's the only thing my stomach can handle because I thought I could not eat carbohydrates, I couldn't eat anything else. So long story short, tangent, that is how I was introduced to you guys. And you cannot get rid of me it's it's funny you walk in everybody walks into these seminars every seminar i go to not just our own but i i still do a lot of education for myself and i'll walk in everybody's got the little tupperware you know some people they'll have the plastic because they're they're fine with that type of thing and some people have the glass and i go phthalates and all that and then they're like can i heat this up oh you have a microwave i don't want to use that people get really crazy that shit then i walk in with a fucking bag of mcdonald's and like 40 nuggets and they look at me they look at me like what are you doing I'm like I'm enjoying myself I'm having some nuggets yeah I know I remember that I think and Krista was there that was the first time I had met Krista and you had referenced working with her a bunch in the in the talks and so I remember I saw her in the locker room and I was like hey I was like you know what's it like coaching with them like you know what did they do and she was talking a little bit about her journey. And I was like, I'm signing up. Like I'm totally, yeah. Like this is, this is going to be it. And literally it was November, 2018. And then that December new year's Eve, I got engaged. And so then it was like it is on wedding time Like let go And I remember I was eating 1100 calories Cause you referenced that in some of your talks that are you lucky you lucky to get that consistently you usually eating under that Yeah. And I literally was like, I don't understand why I can't drop body fat. And, and I had crash dieted a bunch before that. And I lost a lot of weight, but I was soft. And I didn't like that soft feeling. But I was like, I don't know how to get past that point where I'm eating more, but I'm losing weight. Cause you see it all over the internet. You see every coach bragging how their, their clients are eating 300 grams of carbs and their girls are losing weight on like, you know, a thousand gram carb refeeds, which you just did this weekend. By the way, this man just ate 10,000 calories over the weekend. I'm tan. I'm going back and forth. But so, so, you know, only eating that much, I literally thought I was broken, which I know a lot of you guys can relate to, and you just are so desperate. And I think that's the point when people are ready to change when they're, they've tried everything else. They have nowhere to go. Like where, where was that going to go? 700 calories, which some girls have to or have, but I had nowhere else to go. And I was like, please take me in. you're right look when you you get to this long-term yo-yo dieting um especially people who do a lot of photo shoots in the contest prep eventually you run out of wiggle room and if you're sitting in in the triple digit club or close and you're sitting around a thousand calories 1100 calories and you're doing a ton of exercise just to keep the weight from piling on there's going to be at a there's going to be a point where your maintenance is so low your body is accommodated to that, you could try to go lower, but what's the point? Like you're always got to run out of space. So like when you came on, I said, man, we've got to pump your calories up. We have to pump your calories up and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And you just, this is just what you've done to yourself. And, you know, I don't make the rules for physiology, the universe does. And, you know, there was this, that long battle of like, man, I really would like to get you closer, like 1800, maybe in 2100 calories and just deal with putting on a little bit of stored energy for a little bit of time. Let's work on growing some muscle and then create a new maintenance and then take it back down. Cause you, you could have lost more weight if we had taken you down even more calories, but you know, what's the, what's the repercussion of that? You know, you're, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and eventually Peter runs out of money and Paul has nobody to steal money from anymore. And at that point, you feel like shit. You don't have a period, your hair is falling out. You're cold all the time, cold hands and feet. Sleep sucks. Gut sucks. Building muscles sucks. And then you just get to a point where you, you're pretty much fat loss resistant. Your body's trying to hold onto this. And some people will call this starvation mode. I think I don't mind calling it that whatever, but you know, for me, There's a lot of things that people rally against as a matter of semantics, but we can look at it as a body protection mechanism where the body's like, okay, I don't have enough energy to run all these vital organs. So I'm just going to triage everything that I have from everything else and just push it into this. And when you get to that point, it's like you're spinning your wheels all the time. So the only thing you really can do, you've got those two choices. you can keep starving yourself more, or you can say, well, I'm going to go into a maintenance phase, kind of a growth phase, try to put on some muscle, try to get my hormones back up, and then start over again. And man, that took us a long time. Like, yeah, God bless Shane and Shane O'Leary, because he dealt with you for a very long time. And it was like, just a roller coaster of okay, we're doing good. Oh, Ali got crazy today. And I'm like, it's okay, I'll talk to her real quick. And, you know, he's, he's the best person I know for talking women off the crazy train. And so, you know, he, he did a lot of that rebuild over the years with me, just kind of, kind of coaching on that side, but him doing a lot of communication. And then when it was time to pull the hammer for the wedding, I'm like, all right, let's do this. And I'm going to get you real fucking lean because you had to do all that. You had to do all that back work to get the calories up high enough and maintain that high enough for a long time. And it was rough because you have to accept that your body's probably going to go through a transition period where it looks worse and you feel worse. Um, like some things feel better, you know, your body heat comes back, you're sleeping a little bit better. You can train harder, but then the problem is every time you make the mistake of looking at yourself in the mirror, you're like, Oh man, I do not, this is not what I'm what I signed up for. And it's like, that's cool. You got it. You got to kind of grind through that and then keep that weight maintained Okay Now we can create a deficit but let create a smaller deficit and start chipping away at it I think I gained like one kilo which is 2.2 pounds and freak the fuck out. I was like, this isn't working. Oh my God. And, and I'm totally like, I'm not going to be that person. And then I was like, oh my gosh, like, this is like how my clients are. And like, I understand, you know, the frustration of thinking that way. But when you have nowhere else to go, I'm like, I have nowhere else to go, Ali. Like you have to stick with this. How often do people come to you where they need to gain weight before they can lose again, but they're not necessarily ready to understand that? Well, there's, there's two main situations that I see. There's one situation like in your situation where it's just been a many, many years of basically starving yourself. And not just from a calorie standpoint, but also a nutrient standpoint. And then trying to self-medicate with lots of supplements. Well, I'm not losing weight. I'm just going to throw a fat burner in there. I'm going to throw in, you know, an uncoupling agent. I'm going to throw in this or I'm going to add, you know, supplement with five more hours of exercise. And so it becomes that point where that person is kind of an outlier that's outside of what most of the current literature shows. You know, a lot of the literature shows that during a contest prep, which is basically what that sector of people are doing. And I see that a lot with coaches. In most coaches, when we talk about tracking and weighing food, I'm like, okay, you've got great nutritional literature. I can be pretty sure that you're weighing and tracking accurately. The only thing I can't be sure is what are you eating that you're not telling me? So then there's a second subsection of girls that are eating a thousand calories, except on the days they're not eating a thousand calories. And so they, they basically starve themselves down to where their maintenance is very low. and then they go through these periods of basically binging and purging through exercise like not bulimic binging and purging but they use exercise in a way to purge and they use a lot of dieting in order to purge but then they have binging episodes so they might go if you think about a lot of people have structure say monday through friday common work period they have a lot of structure there. They they'll eat thousand calories, 1100 calories every day. And then the weekend comes and they just blow through and they'll eat four or five days worth of food in just a couple of days. So if they keep doing this over time, they diet, diet, diet, diet, diet down. And then they start binging. They go through the periods of binging and purging. Every time they binge, they put a little bit more on and then they diet and they, they it's, they don't binge long enough or they don't go to maintenance long enough to get their metabolism to actually start to creep back up. So they just keep crushing things and then adding more fat, crushing things, add more fat and losing muscle, replacing with fat in a sense. So yeah, the first thing we have to do is for, I think that, I think the best thing to do for both of those categories is to get them to eat at maintenance for a while or near maintenance. Because if you're, if you're just constantly binging and purging your calories globally, on average are probably higher than what you can your tde is right now and it doesn't need to be that much higher if five percent will put on a lot of weight if you do it over 365 days now you do that over a few years and that's a big deal but i find that with the the people who are under eating or under eating and then binging if we just put them their calories back up in their maintenance it eliminates a lot of the binging sometimes we have to go to a surplus and get rid of the binging, but I think that is the disordered eating, not from an eating disorder standpoint, but like not a pathological eating disorder, but kind of a conscious disordered eating. So it's kind of a, I know it sounds the same, but it's a little bit different. Like you could have a psychological eating disorder, or you could just have disordered eating because you're trying to get to this goal that you've now dug a hole that's so deep, you're having a hard time climbing out of it. But if we get you globally eating a consistent amount of calories every day, I'll keep raising those calories until the binging goes away. Now, if the binging goes away, great. Now you're enjoying your diet. You're not hungry all the time. You're not hangry. You're not feeling guilt, stress, and anxiety. And you don't feel like a failure because you keep, you keep, you know, basically driving off the road into the bush. So if we can, if we can get rid of that disordered pattern and build some consistency, build some momentum, that momentum we'll start to build. And then we get a really good baseline of, okay, how many calories can you eat before you gain weight or lose weight Where are we stable If we can find a stable point and maintain that for a small period of time great now I can chip off a couple hundred calories That should give you a good 100 150 grams of weight loss a week. If that's not fast enough, I can keep chipping away another 100 calories until our rate of fat loss is where we want it. And that's the key and to not rush it because people wanna rush this shit. Like we never rushed yours until the very end. It's like, okay, let's get you in a good position. Okay, great. We're 10 weeks out, whatever. Now we can do the low calorie thing because we're only going to do it for a very short period of time. And then we're going to come back out of it. Yeah. And it's funny because like you talk about playing the long game and people come to us as coaches, they want to drop body fat. They want to look a certain way. And I'm like, oh man, like, especially if somebody was in the situation I was in, it's like it takes so much time to build their calories up to to get them off the ledge which took me forever and especially if they're a coach like we think oh well I know my body better and so I'm gonna do this I'm gonna take this supplement and like I did that and you you guys called me out on it I could have healed quote healed or been fixed a lot quicker had I listened better and I mean these are things that I totally own up to, you know, all that stuff. And people are resistant at first, but then when they see what happens on the other side, that's the hardest part, I think, as a coach is to be like, this is what's going on in your body right now. I can't really show it to you, but I can show you what the other side looks like with other clients. Cause that's really the hardest part is just, if you, a year's going to pass anyway, might as well allow us to build your calorie. And I think you had me up at like 21 or 2200. And I put on six pounds, which to me felt like 60, but it really wasn't that much, you know, and I'll show you guys pictures. And then it was that much easier. And I remember I said to Shane in like February of 2019, or March, I was like, so we're gonna get married April 2020 is a year long enough time and and now I laugh because like within three weeks like now we can just pull the plug and like know what will happen but like I was like oh my god is a year gonna be long enough like am I gonna be able to look the way I want and and I'm actually grateful we had to move the wedding four times because I just was able to get better looking and better looking because I I trusted you you know and I was able to like understand what you guys were doing with me because I went through it and now I'm like okay now I can understand how to put clients through this, which now I've learned in your program design course, which is helpful in the nutrition course too. But it's like this big puzzle and you think it's like this proprietary solution that nobody teaches when it's really just more time. Yeah. Look, I mean, that's what people, all the time they come to us and they're wanting some cutting edge thing. We actually had a client come on because he heard me on BPAC's podcast and the guy came on and we gave him standard stuff that we do, which is basic fundamental things. And he was like, I don't think this is going to work out for me because I was expecting some cutting edge high tech. I'm like, well, this is all evidence informed, like literature back stuff we're doing. And then we throw in a little bit of razzle dazzle that we've come up with. It's, you know, we haven't found in the literature yet, but if we know the chemistry, it works out and it wasn't good enough for him. He goes, no, no, no, this is not what I thought it was. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Like, we're going to give you like, I've got some weird secret I got from a fucking Egyptian tomb. Like some I found the secret to getting shredded and fixed fast on some hieroglyphs in fucking Cairo. I mean, come on, man. Like, if you can't know the basic fundamental shit, I'm not going to give you anything advanced. I'm not going to give you crazy stuff that Yeah, do I have some shit in my back pocket? That's crazy. Yes. You can't even track your calories and be consistent. You can't even fucking train you move like shit, your posture shit. Like, Why would I give you some crazy ass protocol when you haven't earned that yet? And, you know, look, there are a lot of great coaches out there. A lot of great coaches know what they're doing. If you, if you look around, everybody's saying the same shit, you know, there are some people that are, you know, they want to add a band to everything and they want to fucking, they want to work on certain angles to hit this tiny little fucking five soccer mirrors and your lower left glute or something. But realistically, if you just fucking work on basic shit, watch Pumping Iron and see how those guys are training. Train like that. Do table pushaways. Watch what goes in your mouth. Make sure you take a good multivitamin, essential fats. It's real fucking easy. What they don't want is they don't want to understand it takes discipline and time to build a truly epic physique. But world-class physique is not built in 12 weeks. I don't care what Instagram tells you. And I think...

social media has jaded a lot of people's opinion, especially people that aren't in the industry that are paying people like this to help them is that Instagram is a highlight reel. So for every, for every client you see that someone puts up that has a truly epic physique, like you and Krista and a bunch of our other clients, there's 10 or 20 more people. They got shit fucking results. And part of that was they just didn't have the mental space to do it. They didn't have the fortitude to do it or yeah, your coaching may suck. It may work for a few people, but it doesn't work for everybody. Some people can just be resistant to things and need a little bit more time, but they go, well, you know, this person did this in 12 weeks. I'm like, yeah, but you're not that person. You, that person doesn't have kids. They don't have bills. They don't have a fucking 60 hour week job. You know, your, your situation is different. Your body's different. So, but the science and the chemistry and the biology is all the same. you know you can sprinkle in a little bit of extra stuff with genetic polymorphisms that might make things a little bit harder for you or you know there might be you know your muscle fiber makeup your by your biomechanics because your skeletal system and your joint all this stuff is going to make a difference on somebody else being very good at a transformation and somebody not being good somebody being good at power lifting and somebody not being good um but most of that stuff is a very small percentage the the one great equalizer is patience discipline and fortitude and just knuckle down and get the done and stop making excuses but everybody wants to make an excuse that it can't possibly be this it's got to be the carbs got to be the fat it's got to be whatever um now the the the deal is you just don't want it bad enough like you either want abs you don't you you either want you either want to bench twice your body weight or you don't all these things take time to develop it's athletic development oh my god yeah and and i've actually like i've said that whatever excuse someone has we have a solution for that barring you know these these like uh crazy situations in a family or something or whatever but somebody who has an excuse i've always provided a solution and then they come back with another excuse and and you and I are very like we we say the truth we're very like unfiltered and I'm like okay when you just don't want it bad enough because I'm sick of seeing you run around in circles and then creating you know excuses and there are people that respond well to that there are others that are like all right go fuck yourself but that's the truth and you had mentioned not comparing yourself and the highlight reel of Instagram. And I want to go down the road of so many people posting how I lose weight on 3,500 calories when they're like my size. And I think that the way the industry has painted a picture is if you go below, you know, the 1200 calorie line, you are going to get metabolic damage. You're no longer going to eat pretty much anything. And you're ruined because people are like, oh my god if you diet for two weeks you're going to be ruined you're going to be damaged and I think I never talked about how low we went in calories publicly number one because people would freak out but number two I knew that we would eventually do this podcast so that we can qualify why we had to go pretty low because I am five foot three and around 60 kilos 63.6 today but with my size doesn't mean that I can diet on like 2,500 to 3,000 calories and I'm going to be 40 on Saturday like you know sometimes you can't just compare what people are saying on Instagram to what you're doing because probably isn't real so can we elaborate on that yeah i mean look there's there's a lot of factors it's your physiological state as far as what is your height and weight you know what is your body composition right now if you have a lot of extra stored energy on your body it's very easy to come off fast when you don't want to when you want to get thick skin lean things start to slow down you have to do things more radical um it could be down to age training age, there's a lot of different factors. Like for myself, I used to train twice a day, every day, six days a week and eat, you know, 4,000 calories for contest prep. And I get lean, but that's when I was mid twenties. Now I'm 43. Now I can't do that anymore. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about G flux. And I think John Berardi is one of the first guys who talked about this. And then Jay Tata talks about it too, as far as eat more, do more, eat less, do less. But the thing that people need our sense, there are limits of what we can do, especially when it comes to body comps If you an athlete and you eating for your sport you can do a tremendous amount of work and probably recover up to a point I mean people run ultra marathons I have ultra marathon people that I train triathletes, fucking adventure racers, all this. But when it comes to changing your body physically and building like bodybuilding, there are limits to how much you can do. So you could always add more exercise, but exercise takes more time. So you have to be able to dedicate that your body adapts to that. So you have to keep doing more and more. You have recoverability. So if you're, let's say you're eating 15, 20% deficit, and you want to try to supplement another 15 to 20% deficit with activity, you could probably do that. And it's going to work for as long as it works, and then it doesn't work. And then you have to make a decision. What do I do now I can do more activity or I can pull more food. The most logical thing to do is to pull more food because it doesn't take more time to do that. And then also, if you keep doing more and more exercise, you have to recover from that. So if you add more weightlifting sessions, that's more muscle damage. That's more anabolic response. You need money to pay for that. And if your money and calories isn't high enough, you're going to lose weight, but you're going to start losing an unacceptable amount of muscle in relation to fat. The goal is to strip fat off and keep all that precious muscle. um so as long as your protein's high enough you can go to pretty low calories but you need to do that when it's time to do that which means if i'm training a woman and she's 32 body fat she doesn't really need to diet that hard like i personally me i'd rather rip the band-aid off and diet hard early and slow it down so diet hard get say six seven percent off as fast as possible Now you're kind of at what I would consider a normal or average body fat percentage. Maybe you're sitting around like 25, 26%. Cool. Let's slow it down from 26 to sub 20. And let's kind of ride it out at a very low deficit and try to do a nice low recomp. And then if you're crazy enough to want to get below 20, which below 20% for women is a lot leaner than they think. Most girls, they think they're 20%. They're more like 28, 29%. and so at that point now if we're going to say we hit 20 21 and you want to drop the 17 18 cool we can pull the hammer again because we've got a lot of room to move so if we need to take your calories low that's totally fine but we have to make a decision you can't train really hard and have really low calories so we're gonna have to at least not for very long we did it with you but it was like two and a half three weeks spurts and then we dialed back the volume and kept the calories the same and kind of let you recover. And then we do another big run. So there's a lot of logistics to go into programming where you have to know that, you know, how much can my client recover from and what are their metrics looking like? Are they sleeping still? Okay. Is their gut still okay? Do they have motivation to train? And I remember one morning you sent me a message saying like, I'm so fucking tired. I just, I don't want to train. I was like, great, because I've already reduced your volume starting next week. And you were like, what? I'm like, yeah, I already knew this was going to happen. Because if you know the biology, you can predict what's going to happen and you can be proactive against that. But most of the people in the industry would just grind it out and they just start grinding your ass on the ground and not take proactive action. But someone at your size, say at one point you're sitting at like 58, 59 kilos, you're not going to be able to eat 3000 calories. And you do you do any type of TD calculator, you do cash, McCardle, you do Harris Benedict, you do Mrs. Miffin, St. George, all of those are going to put your your BMR at like 900, maybe maybe 1000 calories, and then we start adding in TD or adding in meat, they make effect the food exercise, it's not going to be that much, because you might have, you might can increase that 30%, 40% for, let's say, you know, you're doing, you know, four or five weightlifting sessions, maybe a few conditioning sessions, maybe you're getting 10,000 steps a day. You're still going to be at about 14, 1500 calories. So if you want to create a deficit of say 500 calories, you're basically eating at your BMR. And if you want to get the rest of the fat off, that's what has to happen. And understand that getting super lean is not fun. You feel like a bag of dicks. I always tell people, look, if you want to get that lean, we'll do that. But I want you to realize you're going to feel like 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag. So you have to be mentally prepared and you have to want it bad enough to continue on because shit is going to suck. Oh, and did it suck? Now, Now on that comment I think there a lot of misunderstanding as to okay at what level do we accept all this suckness Like when is it too much And we talked about the metrics and tracking that and everything But I think you know people are willing to diet but then if they say they want to get lean, but that doesn't really add up with how hard they're willing to diet, how hard does someone actually like, how far should they push it? And when do you know, it's too much. I look at subjective objective measurements. So the number one thing is I want to know how you're feeling. If you're not motivated to train, we've probably pushed a little bit too far. If you're really fatigued, probably push a little bit too far, which means we don't have to pull the trigger, but we need to, we need to basically pump the brakes a little bit and get you to the point where you want to actually go to the gym. Now, if you're doing a bodybuilding show, you don't have, you don't have a choice. I mean, no, no one wins a bodybuilding show and says, I feel fucking fantastic. If you go to a bodybuilding show, everybody in the top five, they look like fucking death. They got skeletor face. They're fucking, they're limping around. They're trying to pose and they're doing everything they can not to shake and cramp up. So that would, depending on the context, that's a whole different conversation. But, you know, most people who just want to get lean, it's not that hard of a process. You don't have to push yourself that far. Now you want to get super duper lean. We're having a bit of a different conversation. It's a lot of the same process, but it feels different. And your mental fortitude has to be quite a bit higher for that. And you have to be willing to accept, man, I'm going to have to eat a shit sandwich because it sucks. But at that point, you may have to, you may have to say, well, my metrics are going to have to be shit. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to accept that my thyroid hormone is going to go in the shitter. My testosterone is going to go into the shitter. Estrogen digestion is going to go in the shitter. My sleep's going to go to shit. My hair is going to stop growing and it may even start falling out. I'm going to get dry, scaly skin. My fingernails aren't going to grow and they're probably going to get brittle. This is all part of getting ridiculously super lean, leaner than the body actually wants to get. So I would say for most men, most men can probably get easily down to 10 to 12%. No problem. But once you start dipping into single digit body fats, unless you're of kind of like that ectomorphic type predisposition, it's a bit easier for them. But the trade off is it's harder for them to put on muscle, you get somebody who's more on the, you know, more of a, what's the word I'm trying to say, you got a lot of stored energy, I'm trying to be politically correct. So you got, you know, you're, you're rotund. You have, you have an easy time building strength and muscle, you got a really hard time taking off the excessive amounts of stored energy on your body. You know, they're going to have a harder time once they get into the into the teens. So you start getting around like 17, 18, 19, they're going to go on struggle street. If you got somebody like myself, who's a mesomorph, fairly easy to get there without without it being a pain in the ass until you start getting close to like, maybe like seven, 8%. And that's when it starts to kind of suck a little bit. I find for me, it doesn't really suck that much until I get about, yeah, start getting around five to 7%. And that's when I start feeling like a bag of dicks, but I can easily get down, you know, eight to 10. It's not that big of a deal. As long as I can control my desire for my impulse, my ADD desire for shitty foods and booze. For women, you know, most women can probably get down close to 2022. And it's not that big of a deal. Once they go into the teens, that's when it's going to start to suck. And you try to get like stage ready, start getting under 15, 16%, that's when it's going to start to suck. And that's where you're going to have to accept that I either go really slow and chip away, or I lose my period and I'm freezing cold all the time. My hair falls out. I think I remember one night I texted you cause you're 12 hours or sorry, you're 14 hours ahead. So I think it was like one in the morning and I'm like, dude, I can't fucking go to sleep. Like I'm sweating. My heart is racing. I'm staring at the ceiling and you're like, welcome to Dick Skin Lean. And that only happened one time. And that was actually quite close to the wedding. And it was the week after the wedding that I was like, I need a week off. And you always like, I wouldn't say appease me, but you take into consideration how much I love training and that's how you design my programs. And I'm like, I don't want to train like the whole week. I need off. And I was just like, I can't, you know, and it had built up to that. But going through all this, I think having a big external motivator was helpful. But also like the discipline that it takes, it's really, yes, it's a lot more. But when our clients come to us and they just want to get a little bit lean, I'm almost like, yo, it doesn't, it's not that hard. You just have to want it a little bit more than you do because it really isn that difficult because the internet makes it seem like it is It not And it can be for very small population Like I deal with women with Hashimoto's and some of them, they have Hashimoto's, they might have some type of subclinical hypothyroid issue, which most of that's just lifestyle anyway. So it's, if you look at, you know, things like type two diabetes and metabolic syndrome, a lot of that's lifestyle stuff and being um slightly hypothyroid can be part of that as well it can in my experience it can be separate from that or it will line up really well with being insulin resistant metabolic flu resistant all that but all of that stuff that that's just uh basically a mental game and it's all lifestyle stuff uh Hashimoto's a bit of a different deal because you can have a your metabolism could be crushed 15 to 40 percent if you got Hashimoto's especially if your antibodies are really high and you know you're like in the throes of this uh of this disease and sometimes they have to eat far less than they want to and they have to they have to train far less than they want to um because they just don't have the the thyroid to um or the environment to recover from training so we've got people that come from crossfit and they just want to train all the time but they also want to lose 20 30 kilos like well you know here's the thing you're probably going to have to eat way lower than you think you need to. And we just don't have the currency on board to pay some of this back and repair your body. So you're just going to have to accept the fact that you're going to have to get in, get out and put, put the training aspect to the side, not, well, I shouldn't say training, put the training volume in your desire to train a lot, put that to the side, let's get the weight off. That will help with your Hashimoto's. And then we can start raising your calories back up and we can start raising the training with it now that you can actually recover and you're not fucking full of systemic inflammation and all the other things that are going to crush the ability to get glucose where it's supposed to be and the ability for your thyroid to do what it's supposed to do um just completely lost my train of thought on that but we're talking about how it's really not that hard and there's a small percentage of people Right. My, my, my Vyvanse should kick in here in a minute, but for most, for most of our clients, it's just a wants versus needs issue. Like they, they want to get lean. They like the idea of getting there, but they don't need it. And if you don't need it, you're less likely to do it because your motivation to get there isn't high enough. Dave, Dave Shetler, we were on one of his posts. Dave is one of my best friends. And he made a video yesterday. It's like, you know, if, if I, you won't tell me you want to get abs and you want to get lean, but then you can't actually do it. What's the problem? Like, and then you say, well, I don't want it bad enough. Well, that's probably it. You don't want it bad enough. But if I could wave a magic wand and go, boom, now you have abs, would you accept that? And most guys, at least most guys and some women would be like, yeah, okay, well, we can go boom like that. It's just going to take you maybe four months, maybe six months. It might even take you two years, but you can do it, but you have to not want it. You have to need it. And I was going to post this on there, but I didn't. People say the abs won't make you happy. And I agree with that. They won't necessarily make you happy, but they sure as fuck won't make you unhappy. I'll tell you that. Yeah. And I said, when I have abs, It makes Luke happy because then I'm not a pain in the ass and I'm happy. So I don't, you know, I'm not, I'm just happy now. We can, I'm happy now we can get you to 63 to 65 kilos and you're not losing your fucking mind. We only had one tiny psychotic break. And then you were like, oh, the next day I dropped a kilo and a half. Oh, it's just water. He's been telling me that for two years. And then you go in the gym and you fucking PR close to a 300 pound deadlift. your what 25 pounds should i have a 300 pound back squat which makes me makes me realize you're you're slacking on your deadlifts because that shouldn't happen yeah yeah you should easily have it you should easily at 275 back squat you should easily have at least 303 probably 315 deadlift so we have to work on that deadlift but like the coolest part about that is like gaining weight and being okay that's the best because it's the best is when you're like i look at your check-in pics I'm like, she's fucking jacked. And you're like, oh, I made the mistake of watching this video. And when I bend over, my stomach goes over the side of my pants. I'm like, that happened. You could be 3% body fat and you're going to have a roll that's skin going over your fucking shorts. Don't look at that. And then you pick up the bar and your abs look like big fucking beef ravioli. Then remind me of Chef Boyardee, beef ravioli, right? But I think people need to figure out if you really want to get lean and you want to change things, you're going to have to make a difference.

some, you're going to have to make some choices. You're going to have to sacrifice some things. You might have to give up booze for a little bit of time or significantly reduce that. You got to sleep. Sleep's the number one thing, man. You've got to prioritize sleep. That to me, that is the most important thing. Get your blood pressure down, sleep more, get your heart rate down, sleep more, get your sympathetic drive down, sleep more, recover better, sleep more. You know, you want to be less hungry when you're not hungry, when you're asleep, fucking go to sleep. and that's going to be probably a major theme of my heart disease hypertension course is dude sleep like nocturnal nocturnal heart rate nocturnal blood pressure is highly associated with all cause mortality if you can work on getting that stuff down when you go to sleep that should go down significantly so if you have if you have a high labor job or you have a highly stressful job and your metrics are fucked all day because that's just part of your job the best time for you to to fix that is while you're fucking asleep because that stuff should drop significantly. And if it doesn't, the second best thing is do your fucking cardio, um, do more metabolic work in the gym, lower the volume of strength training, raise the volume of your aerobic conditioning. There's some supplement stuff we could talk about as well, but get that in order and look at your Garmin forerunner or ring or whatever. See what your heart rate is at night and take your blood pressure before you go to bed. And right before you wake up, that's the most important time to get that blood pressure below 120 over 80. And I can tell you personal experience, if you can get those metrics really good, you will drop weight really fast and you won't hold as much water because you won't have hypertension and stress-induced edema. And that'll immediately make you look and feel better without doing anything else. My meathead friends had said to me this summer, they're like, I've never seen you this dry. Cause you know what that means? And I'm like, dude, I know like it's crazy. And I think another thing to point out too, is that you mentioned getting your aerobic conditioning in order. When I first started with you guys, I was doing 90 minutes of very low intensity work. And throughout this, I call it prep, wedding prep, whatever you want to call it. Throughout the wedding prep, we only did like 15 minutes a day. And then I think maybe for two weeks, it was a half hour a day. And people were so confused because they're like, how are you not doing two or three hours of steady state and I was like we don't need to why we could just drop calories then you don't have to spend you don't have to train like it's a fucking part-time job um why do so many coaches still do that uh I think part of it is people people don't want to diet or they they have um they didn't plan the right time frame so they have to try to rush it so they start chasing calories and they don't understand that that's a carrot you're never going to get to um your body will adapt to that very quickly, especially low intensity stuff. So like we start, we do the opposite of what everybody else is. We put the aerobics at the front. And the reason we do is because I'm not doing that to burn calories. I'm doing that, but it can be used to burn some calories, obviously. But the main thing is where the adaptations, better mitochondrial health, better oxidation, more angiogenesis, better blood flow, lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, lower sympathetic drive. And then we use weightlifting workouts to pump the sympathetic dry. But most of the people that come to us, their VO2 max is shit. Their lactate threshold is shit. Their heart rate is shit. Their blood pressure is shit. There's a lot of women that come that's the opposite, right? So they don't oxidize well. But their issue typically is too low a blood pressure, too low thyroid, too low heart rate. So we have to utilize weightlifting to bring that up and try to balance them out. But, you know, vast majority of the men that we deal with and some women, the first thing we have to do is give them a shit ton of cardio initially for a very small period of time. Like we could stretch this out over six months, but I'd rather just rip the bandaid off, just get it out of the way. So we can get rid of that and just focus on strength training and maybe some sprint intervals and hit training and all that. Once you've built up that base of aerobic fitness, because everything works really good. You recover better. You burn through energy faster you can breathe better your training gets better everything gets better if you just get to at least a base level of aerobic conditioning get your vo2 max to an acceptable level um and then we can we can work on a lot of other stuff with your training because you can do a shit ton more when you train and you can eat a lot more oh it's beautiful and you had given me maybe one day a week throughout one phase that had sprints and stuff. And I was like, oh man, I haven't done sprints in like two years or whatever. And you're, I think you're, you're like rest, curse my name, do whatever it takes. But it was um it was an all out effort but I was like I feel pretty damn good for not having done this for a while And like any of the assault bike stuff And we started doing 15 minutes of fasted cardio My heart rate dropped to 48. I'm dieting and my heart rate is at 48. Like my metrics were actually pretty smooth throughout this whole thing. Yeah. We didn't do fasted cardio to burn more fat. And I'm now I'm actually in love with it. Do you want to comment on like fasted cardio and why we used it? well look this is one of those points of contention everybody wants to argue about right and it's just like the high carb low carb thing low carb isn't better than high carb well it depends on your physiology and depends on your preference like i prefer doing mostly keto and low carb most of the time and then and then eating enough carbs to support uh training but my version of keto is a lot different than what you normally see because i developed a net more of an athletic keto type solid dieting with a fasted cardio is it inherently better nobody knows um you know they there's a few pieces of literature that they'll champion it wasn't any better they it's like they're like three week fucking trials or they might be two session trials um in some of them they can look at acute markers of increasing things like people are people are alpha and pgc one alpha they can look at ampk marks they can look at all these markers of oxidation um but But there's not that many long-term studies except in bodybuilding. There's a reason why bodybuilders do it. And it's my train of thought, and Dr. Mike Nelson agrees with me with this, is that there might be some long-term adaptations that we're not looking at and not measuring. We're only measuring the acute variables. But if you do this over time, it might actually increase the rate of fat oxidation. And whether that makes a difference or not, who knows. But, you know, if I can get more fat adapted through not, I don't want to say, I don't, we won't say keto or low carb, we'll say lower carb, like cutting, cutting carbs enough to where you have enough to train, but it's, it's also low enough to where you have to rely on more fat. You get more metabolically flexible, utilize aerobics to get more metabolically flexible. One of the cool things that that does is it preserves muscle glycogen. So then when you eat carbs, you have a higher chance of storing that as muscle glycogen, which you need that for your weight training workouts. So, I do want to be clear on the low-carb thing. I consider low-carb, I like lower with kind of the parentheses around the ER. It's in context of what you're doing. So, if you've got a guy who's doing Tour de France, 400 grams of carbs, that might be low-carb for him. I've seen cyclists that are producing ketones, so they are in light nutritional ketosis, and they're eating 300 or 400 grams of carbs a day because of fucking cycling for three or four hours a day. And they're burning all of that off. Um, I currently eat around 150 grams of carbs a day, and I still produce anywhere from 0.6 to 1.2 ketones every single day. And my blood sugar sits around 3.8 to around 4.7, which is for me, picture perfect. And even after the 10,000 calories Saturday I had, so I had a, I had a 10,000 calorie Saturday over a thousand grams of carbs, a good majority of those carbs coming from port because I drank quite a lot of port on Saturday. Cause I haven't been drinking. So I kind of went crazy. the next the next day I was still producing like 0.9 ketones um my gosh after a thousand grams of carbs and so yeah I'm eating 150 grams of carbs keto's keto you can't have carbs you can't have more than 50 grams of carbs yes you can depends on the context depends on the person um it has to be high fat I eat about 90 to 100 grams of fat a day still producing ketones a lot of it has to do with the car the fat that you select you know choosing more mcts over everything else so most of my fat comes from coconut oil and and then i also do olive oil because the cardiovascular benefits you can't have high protein i ate about 225 to 250 grams of protein a day i'm still i still have plenty i am i in huge a huge amount of ketosis no but if you're producing above say 0.5 0.6 millimoles you're in ketosis you're in light nutritional ketosis guess where a lot of that's coming from when you wake up and you have high fasted ketones that's coming from the breakdown oxidation of fat so it's a beautiful thing it works really well for me i sleep better my heart rate is right now resting hours 48 my endurance goes up my inflammation bloat goes down now that doesn't work for everybody but it works really well for my my genetics but did you finish the cinnamon and toast crunch. I did have a, I've had two massive bowls of chocolate toast crunch. Um, yeah, so I had one on Saturday and I had one the previous Friday for a three, 300, 400 gram, uh, refeed that day too. So um but yeah look with the fasted cardio stuff um what what are the possible benefits Possibly that you train the body to become more fat adapted and oxidized better That's one bit of it. Secondary benefit is it's really fucking easy to just wake up, put on your sneakers, go for a run. It's a lot easier than I don't believe in fasted cardio. So I'm going to wake up and have a big breakfast. Now I have to wait for that to digest. And oh, well, shit, now I got to go to work. And then after work, you're like, well, I need to have dinner. So you're going to have dinner. and as well, fuck, I just ran out of time. I got to go to bed because Luke said prioritize sleep. So now I can't do my cardio. You just get up, get it knocked out, have your coffee, get on the treadmill, knock it out while you're still half asleep. Just get it done. It's certainly not going to hurt anything, right? It's not going to make you lose all your muscle, but it's, it's a convenience. It's easy. Um, are there some long-term adaptations? Possibly. I think that, I think that the, that's still up in the air, but there's a, there's probably a good reason why bodybuilders have done fasted cardio for like 80 fucking years maybe because it works it's amazing how like all the the things that bodybuilders have been saying for the past i don't know 30 years all those studies that have now been done and are coming out it's pretty much the same thing well that's it i mean that's kind of what scientists do right they what's the first thing that what's the first part of the scientific method i observe something happening okay now let's try to figure out if we can if we can figure out what's happening or let's try to falsify it and they're like oh great look the bodybuilders know what they're talking about you know 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein for the RDA and well okay that keeps you from having a disease bodybuilders eating 2.2 that's way too much so then a few years later oh we're realistically for athletes it needs to be 1.2 then a few years later it needs to be 1.4 then 1.6 and the last literature I saw coming out, came out about two years ago, said 1.8. And the author in the paper said, look, bodybuilders have been eating 2.2 grams per kilogram for decades and decades. The ISSN has done some literature saying that they did upwards of 3.3 to 4.4 with no negative issues. So you might as well just eat 2.2 and then you don't have to worry about, is it enough? yeah i i mean so many people are like how do you eat 200 grams of protein how do you eat 150 and now you have me at 135 which i think is the lowest and i hate it but still i'm not going to complain but all those years where you had me super high and i was like i love it like it's awesome same i love protein it's like look the reason we took it to 135 is at the end of the day no matter what diet, you still have to play by the rules of energy balance. You can't get around that. I know people try, if you want to try to get around that, great. You can take things like DNP. You can take mitochondrial couplers and that type of stuff. It's still calories out. You can build more mitochondria. That's still calories out. So you can get calories out through exercise. You can get calories out through basically supercharging your mitochondria with supplements or drugs or whatever. But at the end of the day, you had, it's a basic algebraic equation a minus b equals c and if you want to lose weight um b has to be a higher number than c right you got or you have to at least have enough you got to have deficit you you're not getting calories from air like you don't breathe calories in that you breathe in things that allow you to combust or metabolize the stuff that you're eating but there's a there's a lot of things that go into it as far as am i making enough red blood cells do i have enough iron do i have b12 b6 B9? Am I making hemoglobin? Am I transporting it effectively? Do I have enough aerobic enzymes to burn through it? Like there's a lot of shit that goes into that algebraic equation. So it's a lot more complex, but at the easiest, simplest user defined thing is, okay, if I'm tracking my food and I know I'm eating 1500 calories and I know I'm expending, let's say 200 calories and I'm not losing weight, I need to pull off maybe 200 calories and see if that moves me in the right direction. And then you can keep pulling calories until you're playing within the confines of what physiology will allow, which, you know, most people say 0.5 to 1% of their body mass per week. On average, that's probably not going to happen every week. It could, but it's probably going to go up and down. Or I like what Lane Norton came out. There's a new piece of literature that said slower is better. So I'm right. Long game is better if you want to hold onto your muscle. So he actually came out and said, look, I'd prefer people look at like 0.3 to 0.8. And if you're really lean, go on the 0.3 side. I absolutely agree with him because once you're at the level of leanness where you need to slow it down that much, you already look real fucking good. You look better than 99.8%. What the fucking rush to get one more vein on your oblique What the rush So if you sitting at 10 11 12 body fat you already look damn good why rush it and and and worry about losing testosterone losing estrogen progesterone you lose your thyroid why don't you just cut it down and just chip away 100 150 grams a week because then you can do a nice long slow recomp and you don't have to rebound you have to reverse diet, you're pretty much, you're pretty much eating almost at maintenance. And you, you had set my calories up and down. And that's another thing too, to, to point out is that we had gone, I think the lowest we went was 1100, but it wasn't 1100 for two years or three years. Like when I came to you, it was only for a couple of weeks. And then you would raise protein and then, you know, you tweak it around a little bit. and when people hear 1100 or 1200 they're they're like oh my god but it wasn't well i just remembered why i just want to tangent the reason i did i don't like taking protein down i like keeping it as high as someone can afford digest and desire because the the one macronutrient you can't do without is protein uh the second one is essential fatty acids so as long as your protein is good and you're taking some fish oil you're gonna eat fuck all calories and you lose a shit ton of weight you wouldn't have a good time you'd be hungry all the time you'd be miserable irritable you'd be a cunt that nobody wants to fucking hang out with but um but uh you know you you still you have to create a calorie deficit somewhere and i think we had your your carbs were somewhere around like 70 or 80 and i still wanted you have enough carbs to be able to go train on um and then i think your fat was somewhere around like 30 or 35 something like that and then i said okay well i don't want to, I don't want to do more work because you got to recover and you're already getting tired. And I, I don't want to pull, I don't feel comfortable pulling fat down the fuck all. Sometimes I'll do that for bodybuilding the last three weeks, but you're not doing a bodybuilding show and definitely don't want to pull your carbs down because then you're not going to be able to train hard. So the last thing, the last of the Mohicans was to take your protein from like 185 and say, well, I'll take it to 135 and get another 200 calories out of this. So let's do that. yeah and it's been easy to adapt to I was just kidding when I say hate it because I'll miss my protein but but it's funny how you miss it when it gets taken away when at first you're like oh my gosh that's so much and then you know you get used to it and being able to eat more I think people people say have the same fear that I did when they gain weight they think it's never going to come off because they've spent so many years trying to get it off and then when they put more on, it doesn't come off and they don't look the way they want. Or if they do lose weight, they're a smaller version of the shape that they were. They don't change their shape. And one thing that I've noticed, and I've said, I think I'm okay with the weight gain. And my friends have said, like my friend, Ed, he's like, you've maintained that shape. And that was because of the work that I did with you guys, because I still have visible abs, even though I've put on eight pounds since the wedding where in the past if i put on eight pounds oh shit i'd be back at like 900 calories already yeah and i'm like give me all the food well the thing is like at the when we first started like you had no muscle to speak of right you were training but you those the pictures you sent me yesterday i'm like wow i because i forgot like because i see you almost every day i'm like i forgot how awful you look back then and you were dieting and training hard now we could have gotten you leaner at that point but what's the point of looking like a fucking coat hanger when it's like you're not gonna like the way you look and i when you talked about that being a smaller version yourself and you've heard me talk about this in class i call it the the jared um it's like the jared analogy jared from subway so you have this really big fat pedophile and he eats six to eight hundred calories of subway and now he's a small fat pedophile like He didn't, if anybody doesn't know, he's in prison now for like pedophile pictures and shit. Good job, Jared. But it's like, it's like people, when they, when they come to train and they want fat loss and all this, they don't have in their mind. Oh, I love the shape I am here. It's 50% body fat. Can you just make me look smaller? um they're they're getting an idea of you know they've seen a victoria swimsuit model or they've seen a bodybuilder they like or a bikini chick or instagram model um and they're like i want to look like that cool we're gonna have to build something that's underneath all that stored energy because if i pull all that off you are not gonna like the way you look um so we have to go through a body composition change what's what's cool about this for gen pop though is in the first especially especially women,

so imperative that they do a lot of weight training the first four to six months, because even if they overeat on their diet, it's pretty much quite clear that you could still overeat your diet. As long as you're lifting weights hard and probably taking care of a little bit of your cardiovascular stuff with some aerobic activity, it's almost impossible for you to put on fat, even if you're overeating a little bit. So these people who are like, oh, you know, I tried everything I did for four or five months of weightlifting. And, you know, I was, I was dieting a little bit and I never lost weight. Bullshit. Your weight might not have changed, but your body composition damn sure would have changed. But I think for a lot of women, that's the hard thing to accept is that if you're doing it right, your weight is not going to drop that much in the first 16 to 20 weeks. But you're going to notice that the composition of what you look like is different. If I take a woman who is eating 40 to 60 grams of protein, which is pretty common. If I put her at 120, 140 grams of protein, she's going to have an anabolic response. Her muscles are going to soak that shit up and grow. If she's combining out four or five hours of weightlifting, she's going to be growing muscle at a massively fast rate as, as fast or even faster than she can lose weight. So in a lot of cases, you might have women that don't lose anything at all the first four or five months, or they may only lose a couple of kilos, but they'll go down two or three dress sizes the only problem is they're so focused on the scale and the gravitational pull of earth on their mass that they can't they can't look at oh uh my circumference measures drop fucking 15 uh 15 centimeters or whatever they don't look at that stuff because they're so obsessed about the scale oh yeah do you remember when i started i wouldn't even get on the scale I made Charlie send the number in my starting weight because I was like, I don't want to look at it. And I think I was 135 pounds, which is roughly where I sit now. But it's completely different. And I tell people all the time, my weight has pretty much sat at 60 kilos for three years. When we started dieting for the wedding this year, I was 62 and a half. I am 64 kilos and I look completely different than I did in May. like it's unreal it's probably a good time to bring up the slideshow i think i think i think you should you should contact marvel and ask them if you could play she-hulk yeah just like from the stills in my video that we went over the one night when i felt fat and you're like okay really really like come on so funny um how do i share my screen you go to hit share screen yeah all right idiot all right here we go so this is Ali's muscle nerd journey oh yeah so that was right before I came to you guys that was at Todd's gym in like September of 2018 that is what 1100 calories will get you if you pose the right way but this was not sustainable so i don't look terrible here now hold on i yeah i just want to say like yeah if you pose the right way look you can and a lot of women will look at this and go i'd love to look like that right um but they also have to understand shadows and angles and understanding how to turn your body for that exactly and that's why that's what i really looked like and the thing i noticed the most is look at, I have like old, old lady, but like my ass was falling. I played college soccer and all of a sudden I'm like, where did my glutes go? Well, you know, it's, it's, I had to take you all. You were taking too much of that medication, no acetal. So once we took you off, no acetal, we can build some glutes, but look, and let's be clear. Look, a lot of women would love to look like this. And so, you know, you, you, this, but this wasn't your vision. This isn't what you wanted to look like and you were struggling, but I'll tell you, like, I've got lots of clients, gen pop clients who would love to look like that. And that's probably, you know, as lean as they'd want to get to and as much as they'd want to get to. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but everybody has their own vision of what they want to look like. And look, it's your life, it's your journey and you know, whatever makes you happy. Yeah. For me, I was like, I want to, you know, have my quads come back. I want to look like Dana Lynn Bailey, like, you know, give it to me so that was my first progress picture with you guys um and that's back when i had boobs too so i got those taken out i'm like oh my god they look huge how much do they weigh uh they're like 0.9 pounds each when i say yeah so about uh what's that 0.2 pounds yeah about a kilo each so you actually replaced that kilo with a kilo of muscle it the best replacement than ever And this is when you can tell how thrilled I am about gaining weight So this was in April of 2019 I think this was like the height of when I was at like 2100 2200. Not happy, but again, not terrible. Man, a testament to you, you put your trust in us. You said, well, we've come this far, I'm not going to quit. Let's just see what happens. You just kept, kept most people in my experience, they would just quit because like, well, this isn't working out. I'm going to go to this other trainer. Who's willing to starve me and fuck me up long-term just so I can be real fucking skinny and, and lean. Yeah, definitely didn't quit. Don't know what I was thinking with my hair at this time, but we'll, we'll ignore that. I'm still gaining weight again. I don't know who let me out like that with my hair but that was right after uh this was after my surgery too so got my implants out so i immediately dropped a couple pounds so that was funny because the scale didn't really budge that much and i was like what the hell i just got like these two massive things out like why didn't it maybe that helium in your implants they might have very much now one thing one thing to notice is you can go back to that last one you can also see now like your face is getting lean though so your face wasn't as profit so you're starting to drop some water and uh what what um i don't know because we didn't run labs back then for this but a lot of cases when people have a lot of stress dieting is stress training is stress not sleeping that type of stuff they can start holding water in their face so that's a clear indicator of possible blood pressures and also cortisol issues when you start getting moon phase. So when people start getting into, again, for lack of a better word, adrenal fatigue syndrome, where they have a lot of different symptoms of chronic fatigue, low hormonal output, especially cortisol, people will tend to hold a lot of water in their face and get what they call moon phase. And also, I never looked at these photos. So I would have Charlie take the photos, and he would upload them to you guys. I didn't want to see them. And then I started taking video when he would travel because I still couldn't look at the photos up until this year when you were like, don't send me a fucking video. I was like, I'm not going to take the screenshots. And actually going through all these old photos was the first time that I've ever done that in my life. So when people think that like fitness professionals have their shit together. No, we just we have just as many insecurities and issues as you guys do. We're way crazier than our clients. We're much worse if they only knew. Oh my God. And I'll tell you one thing on the weight, because then I started had, when you started getting comfortable, I think the best thing ever was when I told you to turn, switch your scale into kilos, because as an, as an American, when you put the scale, the kilos, you, it at least for a small period of time, it fucks up your ability to rationalize your weight because it's a different number. And it, what I've found with people who, who aren't with the rest of the world in the metric system, myself included until I moved overseas, it's, it's a lot, it's, it's, when you see a pound on the scale that you go up a pound, that's kind of scary to a lot of people. but if 454 grams goes up the scale which is the same exact weight it's not as scary because you're like oh a gram is tiny and then i can you know what i remember one of the things i told you i went hold up your water bottle you know how many milliliters is that you know it's 500 grams half a liter okay that's a little over a pound and you look at that and go oh that's not scary at all so a lot of it's switching your brain and saying i'm gonna stop focusing on pounds i'm gonna focus on pounds on my list because it makes it makes it look more impressive but i'm going to look at grams use the metric system for my weight because a it's easier for the calculations when you're calculating things like you know bmrtd all that but also if you lose gain gain 100 200 300 grams it doesn't seem like a big deal so it's a psychological trick oh my god that was like the best thing ever and using the metric system because now that i have international clients i'm like yeah i know what i'm doing it but before i was like i don't know if you suck at math like i do i'm like i don't know what the fucking math is on this like i'm just gonna look at kilos and report this how much i weigh and i didn't do the math forever and it definitely helps not a mind fuck wait until you get somebody from the uk and you don't know what the fuck they're gonna tell you they could be miles kilometers kilograms pounds stone i've had people send me their weight and i'm like bro can you just send this in kilos because now i gotta take that and i gotta multiply that by 14 and I got to do this other and it too much but yeah that was the best part and it actually really cool like after your poop and you like yeah that was like 800 grams of poo It the best part This is when we started reshaping. Cause you could see a difference like in the legs and then bringing the waist in a little bit. Booty's getting perky. Still. Yeah. My, my butt's lifting itself. I don't know how to dress myself that much, but the hair, the hair is still cool. That was like, Oh, I don't even know. I don't even know. It got shorter and it got better. So now butt's coming up higher. No more like saggy sagginess here, which I was very excited about. These were taken via still shot in the video. So these are, you know, first time I was ever looking at this. And then this is a side-by-side of now, this was the summer. The real glow up is the hair because I mean, so, but you can tell a difference like in the glutes and stuff which in the quads like and you would always say like dude look at your quads yeah and i was like wow like that's really cool at that point i knew we had to do some about your hamstrings though uh and i was actually watching your watching your videos from your last workout and i was like holy fucker hamstrings uh i do want to i do want to say i'm gonna have to teach you how to count seconds because those weren't four second essential center deadlift and those those also those also weren't um holds at the top of your hip thrust either so my god my clients will love hearing this because i always needle them about that but hey it's 225 for five so yeah yeah that's all it matters and then um this i had posted this summer because i was talking about weight and when what we're saying before about how you can pretty much look very similar with all different weights and then I added in yesterday so this is 64 kilos so this is what 10 pound difference between here and here and it's really not aesthetically a massive difference but you can tell like I think if you if we did circumference measures because it looks you can tell like your legs your legs are growing now like really starting to grow um and i also want to say like looking at that wedding day picture um yeah for forever and a day you kept telling me i don't want to be fucking veiny and grainy and shit for my wedding i go no you don't we're not we can do that we'll do that after the wedding but i'm not you need to enjoy your wedding to be stressful enough going into the wedding and you need to be able to enjoy it. And if I, if I get you to the point where you're like 12, 13, 14%, and you got veins everywhere, you're going to feel like a hot, steamy dump. So I'm not going to do it. And I didn't get that. If coaches are listening to this, you have to be, you have to be honest with your client and you have to know when to say no, like you wanted to get to that level. I went, no, I'm putting my foot down. I'm not going to do it. I'll get you lean. You'll look very good. We're going to focus on making your back look awesome in your dress, but I'm not going to take you down to the point where you look like death and feel like death when you should be enjoying your wedding we can do that after the wedding yeah and and i was so grateful that you did that because leading up to it i think it was the week before i was like oh man had we had we gone down the road that i wanted to i would not have enjoyed that process and it was so nice to enjoy the time just leading into it because it is so stressful too on top of that it's not like you know just a photo shoot and now our goal is a photo shoot yeah i mean i fuck i mean zoe and i got married um february 2nd 2020 and i remember and i it was stressful for me and i didn't have to do anything like she took care of everything because i'm only good at this shit yeah i'm a wreck at everything else so zoe zoe's does everything and uh and i i was able to you know do the same thing you did i wanted to look good at my wedding So I did a combat and I just done a jujitsu comp too. So I was looking, I look like a fucking weapon. But that was even going to, it was stressful as shit. Cause you got to pack all your shit. Like you guys had to fly. We had to drive a few hours away. You know, I've got my mom's coming in. My niece is coming in my family from New Zealand. Like it's fucking stressful. And then the whole wedding is like, you, you're so busy all fucking day. And then you get to hang out for like two hours. So I, if I being in that made me more empathetic of saying, look, you're not going to want to do that. I know that's what you think you want, but you're going to, you're going to thank me for not actually taking you to that level because we can always do that after this in a photo shoot. Right. Which we will in December, I will be veiny and grainy. But the mission was accomplished with the back because I had a veil and it was literally when I put my dress on in the bridal suite that we all like you can wear that no like it covers your back absolutely no who the fuck wears the veil one of my friends made me buy it I was like I don't want to wear that shit this isn't fucking Victorian England and shit man you know and so now we have day one and then mid mid journey this because it's never ending it's it's a lifelong process but you know the quads are coming back i'm just so excited it might i'd rather have pecs than i think too like it's it's it's all cool to look at the physical transformation but i think it's really the mental and psychological transformation as well because i um that first pick there's no way if i told you oh i'm going to take up to 65 kilos you would have fucking lost your shit oh my god and to to be like 64 on the scale and be like yep there we go and like i would i was laughing like the day i think i hit 63 i was like i had that minor panic attack but then we watched our videos or my videos and i was like oh like you're an idiot and then i did a dexa scan last weekend which showed that my body fat was 17 so clearly I haven't been rapidly gaining fat as my brain would think. And then I think my, I last tested my RMR four or five years ago, it was 1400 and it was 1700. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it said, what did it say with your activity is some like 2100. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, you know, it's amazing. And this is the backs, you know, that we had posted to that, that was the goal for the wedding dress to have that. And I remember this was in like Charlie's old house and I had crash dieted. I was like, you see how soft to me, not to everyone else, but to me, I could tell how soft I was. I was a smaller version of who I was. I didn't want to, I wanted this. And we were worried that the dress would not fit. And that was right before one of the other wedding dates. And then you guys just turned me into a machine. And now I'm heavier on this side then I am on the left on the left I think I was like 60 point something and I think this is like 60.7 or 61 which again completely different I could be the same weight too and then it would be the same but but yeah that's like huge with the the mental side of it is that if you if you trust your coach and you know that they're also not going to let you get to a point where you're going to look sloppy and you might think in your mind you might look different but they're not going to let you get to a place that that you're not going to enjoy I guess would be the right word I mean granted in the beginning we had to go there but you had prefaced that and you had told me that and educated me about it but I mean to be able to gain weight yeah you might have to get to a point where you don't feel very comfortable but to me it's like well if we're starting at a for starting at a level where you already don't feel comfortable and you actually want to change it's an uncomfortable process because we may have to you may have to not feel very good in your skin um and it's that's why so many people it's hard for them to do it um because they just don't want to get to that level of well i'm just gonna wear fucking sweats all the time because i just don't i just don't like the way i look and and you think that everyone else cares what you look like nobody gives a fuck like when you're out of when you're out of shape nobody gives a fuck but when you're in shape everybody gives a fuck so it's like when it's do you want to be at that level or not so if you want to be at that level where you go in and you said the other day when you were maxing out your bench the whole gym stopped and was watching you do you want to be at that point okay well you may have to go through a transition period where you are self-conscious, you just, you just need to work on your mental space and say, look, I'm doing this for a very small period of time to rectify the dumb shit that either I did to myself or another coach did. And just understand it's a very small, very small. I think fastest I've seen people recover from this stuff where we could start before weeks, if they did everything we say, sometimes it might take four months, but that is such a small part of time in your life. if you want to do it right. So you can either do it fast or you can do it right. If you do it right, guess what? You can lose it forever instead of just losing it fast. And that's one of the things that I see people do wrong is they don't plan. They don't periodize everything. They don't have an off season. They're just constantly dieting and they don't get stronger and they don't grow muscle and they get fat loss resistant and they get tired and then they get demotivated and they just don't do anything at all. And then they just get worse. So, um, you got to sit down with it, with a coach that knows what they're doing, um, preferably a muscle and

trained coach and they plan this whole thing out and say, look, your basal body temperature is like 35.4. That's not great. We need to increase your thermogenesis, which means we need food available. So we're going to have to eat more food and we're going to have to train a little bit and we have to grow some things and you're going to have to prioritize sleep and you're going to have to might have to give up some social things. You can still be social, but you might have to be that person that goes in and goes, no, I have goals and I don't want to eat like that. I'm going to have a salad with chicken, or I'm going to have a steak and some, you know, some potato and no, I'm not going to throw bacon bits and sour cream on that shit. But you have to understand that if you want that physique, you do have to make some sacrifices because nothing worth having, everything worth having is worth working for. So if you're not willing to work for it, you just accept the fact that it's not going to happen for you until you get your head right to actually pull to trigger and do it. And my God, I'm so grateful for you guys. And like, you know, you can navigate this stuff too. Like in July, I spoke in for NSCA and we went out to a steakhouse and I was, it was one of those low calorie weeks. And I was like, I'm fucked. What am I going to have at the steakhouse? Like, and they had, you know, a seared tuna appetizer, which if you know, you're going to get like a tuna, you know, there's nothing on it. And I asked for that with salad, with no dressing. And the guy was like, did you compete today? And I was like, dude, if I competed today, like I'd be face first in a ribeye right now. You don't understand. And everyone around me is getting like steaks and fries and all that stuff. And the thing that you have to think to yourself is like, that will always be there. It will be there when you're done. It doesn't mean you have to implode face first into these things and binge, but if you do it the right way, you don't feel the need to binge too, but it'll always be there. And you may have to give up temporarily the need to enjoy a steak with your friends, but you can still enjoy the time with your friends and then have something that is going to align you with your goals. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Look, and you know, it's tempting to want to do that all the time, but the problem is that people they feel like they treat every meal like they're entitled to eat whatever the fuck they want or they treat every meal like it's a goddamn celebration it's like you don't have to do that like first and foremost look like let's throw that anti-dieting culture bullshit in the trash can okay if you're if you just want to lose some weight cool that's fine you don't need to track or measure anything as long as you have good nutritional literacy you can use hand measurements you can eyeball it you can work on your hunger cues and that type of thing if you're wanting to build an epic physique, it takes precision and accuracy, it takes discipline, it takes willpower, it takes fucking wherewithal to do it. And so that means that, you know, you have to treat food as fuel, I'm eating for performance, I'm not eating for pleasure, and then saving those times are going to eat for pleasure saving for when that matters, like somebody's birthday or a Christmas meal, or, you know, every once a month, you go with your friends, you go with your partner once a week. Like you can plan for all of this stuff, but you still, if you're, if you've got goals and you want to get there, you have to have boundaries, you have to have rules and you have to be able to stay, play by the rules and stay on those boundaries. And if you don't want to do that, then play the long game and focus on a really long recomp with a very small deficit for protein high. And then you can be a bit more flexible, just realize it's going to take a little bit longer to get there. That's the thing. And hopefully people are becoming a little bit more patient with your continued education that you've been putting out with, you know, a lot of the muscle nerds coaches being able to duplicate in some way, the same type of results for clients. Cause now people ask often like, well, how do you get people to buy into that? And when you've gone through the proper training and if you've gone through it yourself, it's a lot easier to be able to explain to somebody, this is what you should expect. This is what's going to happen. Like you predict like my what what I'm going to weigh you predict what I'm going to lift like it's like crazy where I'm like I need to lift more so I can prove them wrong you know like it's like it's amazing how you can accurately predict what is going to happen to me physiologically and sometimes mentally as well because you've done this over and over and over it's not like you just hopped on Instagram one day and fits boat and all of a sudden you're like yeah I'm going to become a coach like this is what real coaching is. It's not a program that you just email me and then say, Hey, talk to you later, like have a nice day. People are committing to this process and it is a big commitment. And I think that it's so important that you continue to get that message out because there so much on Instagram Like I had somebody asked me about waist trainers the other day and there a lot of misinformation that we think is like dead but it still there people still believe these things I still get asked if you know 30 grams of protein I was asked a couple of days ago at jiu-jitsu is 30 grams of protein the most you can digest I'm like no when's the last time you ate a rotisserie chicken a shit out of chicken leg it doesn't work like that now there's there's caps on how much is usable for things like building muscle but that's not the only thing you're using protein to build you're using it for calories protein oxidation you're using it to build enzymes there's a lot of things a lot of structures are building in the body not just your muscle um and now they used to think 40 grams was the limit for stimulating muscle party synthesis and they just another new literature came out said it's probably 70 so all these people saying you can only eat 30 grams i usually eat 70 to 100 grams of protein per mil just because I don't want to fucking eat 800 mils a day I'm good eating two or three mils that works with my schedule and it and so that's what I do but um it's it's so weird to me because when you look at athletic development let's say a guy is benching you know what's the first milestone for a guy that starts to lift 135 pounds 35 yeah what's the next one 185 then 225 then 275 then 315 and then if you if you want to get really strong then you 365 405 you're you're you can't rush that process you're not going to bench 135 and two weeks later you're benching 315 i don't even you take all the drugs in the world that you want you can eat all the food you want you sleep all you want you train all you want ain't gonna happen people look at developing strength as a slow continual gradual process of progressive of overload and eliminating weak areas. Why don't you use that same concept with building muscle and burning fat? Because it's the same thing. It's biology can only run so fast. It can only run so fast naturally, and it can only run so fast if you add supplements and drugs. But a lot of these things, if you understand the biology, these things are easy to predict. And that's why I can predict that because I know when I give a protocol, I've sat down for hours and I've thought it out. And I know exactly what's going to happen. And that's why I have a program design course, because we teach people how to do that. But that does, you have to learn a theory and then you have to get experience of actually doing it. And then you get to the point where you can say, okay, in six months, you should be at this body weight, give or take a couple of kilos. You should be at this body fat percentage. Your lift should be here and boom, you nail it. But that comes with over two decades of training people and an obsessive, compulsive, relentless pursuit for education. Both myself and my wife, we're a bit education junkies. We're knowledge junkies. So my wife is doing a degree right now. She's probably not going to do anything with it. And then she's already looking at her next degree. And it's just a bit of a weird obsession. I should probably go see a psychologist just about it. But it's something that I think more, more coaches need because even like Charlie still takes courses all the time and he takes courses over. And I don't think enough people do that. Cause they're like, yeah, I took that cert like 12 years ago. And I'm like, okay, but things have changed. I'm sure they've added, you guys add stuff all the time to your program design course. And I'm like, I've taken it like five times now and I'm going to take it again. Yeah, it really is. Like the value that you provide for the program design course, it is, I can't even explain. Like for the coaches listening, and I know you guys just started a new intake, you have to start that right now. Cause I literally cannot say that anything has changed my career the way this course has and the mentorship work that we've done. I make more money. I have much more confidence in what I'm doing. It's not just guessing at reducing calories or having knee-jerk reactions to when people complain. It's actually knowing the physiological process of why you're doing what you're doing and explaining it to the client and talking them off the ledge in a way that makes them understand that they're heard and that they're not crazy, even though we're very crazy. But I literally, I can't say enough about the value. And I swear that Luke's not paying me to say this. This is just me going off on a tangent. You guys have to take that. if you want to get good at coaching clients to get them the aesthetic results and in turn, they will have the emotional change and epiphanies. You have to take this course because nobody else is offering anything like this. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I've taken everything you can offer. I think unless there's something you've offered, I haven't taken it. You got no, not, not till I, not till I get time to do the other stuff, But, you know, and look, have I have I ever done anything crazy in your workouts? Have I ever done Have we ever talked about doing you know biasing a certain muscle or doing this Have we ever done weird ass rollerblading Yeah, no, the rollerblading is legit, I'm telling you. But most of the stuff we do teach is fundamental things, but it's the way we teach it and how we teach people to apply it. And we teach why it works and how it works. So you can, if you, if you understand the underlying physiology, anatomy, the biology, the biochemistry, just the basic, basic, at the basic level, like first, second semester of this stuff. If you understand that really deeply, you'll understand how to apply foundational fundamental things in a very complex way. So it's the way you put everything together. And I've never had to do any crazy ass shit. And you see in the program, we don't teach any crazy shit, but we teach it in a different way and teach people how to think about it differently. And for the most part, how to think, because people teach methods, but they don't explain how to modify the method, alter the method, sequence the method in the way that's designed for each person as their own end of one, their own experiment, their own journey. um people are too busy they're too busy complicating and convoluting biology and physiology and you don't really have to do that the coach should know how to apply this stuff in underlying science at a very complex level but they need to be able to distill that down into very simple action points for their clients and stuff their clients can actually do yeah i gotta say like throughout the entire when when stuff got hard like when when the dieting got hard like yeah it was hard yeah i was hungry but like it was not misery compared to stuff that other coaches made me do in my past and being a coach myself like all right yo this is like much more doable this is much more sane it's much more smart like i enjoyed that whole process and people say like enjoy the process you know whether you're on a journey to lose a little bit or you want to get you know dick skin like i wanted to like you expect a certain level of difficulty but it never got to the point where it's like i hate this i can't do this i don't want to do that you know like it's smart and it's not beating people over the head and making them diet for months on end which i think a lot of people do when they don't know what else to do that's like the knee jerk reaction let's just lower calories let's keep lowering it's not working i think i think at that point too it's it's one of those things where I'm really tempted to put this on the whiteboard to really really get people to understand this I'm gonna you can let's see remember the time I drew dicks on your whiteboard and you didn't know what was going on yeah and you didn't realize you were doing it and then you realized you were doing it and then you wouldn't stop and then I was like where do these dicks come from and then I saw you laughing and then you texted me and I was like can you see my whiteboard yeah all right so when we looking at like long-term periodization if we if we just look at it from a physique standpoint we won't talk about athletic development or strength development or power development anything like that we're just physique so let's say in the realm of fat loss okay you've got a minus b equals c so you've got calories in calories out equals deficit maintenance surplus whatever when it comes to the training side of things there's a lot of stuff we can alter okay so and most of that stuff is going to come to the beat so i don't think there's anything um new with aerobic training or anaerobic training or a you know anaerobic lactic anaerobic a lactic i mean we've got all these methods a bazillion ways you could do this HIIT training versus HISS training versus MISS training versus LIS versus aerobic sprints, whatever. But what you're looking at is how do I take the stuff we already know how to do and sequence this stuff and focus on the adaptations. So one of the first things for calories out is if I can increase my aerobic output and my cardiac conditioning, that will increase oxidation by increasing mitochondrial volume and the speed at which mitochondria can make energy and also make heat and a lot of other things that you make in the mitochondria. I can increase angiogenesis, meaning I can actually increase the amount of blood vessels I have going to my muscles and going to the fat specifically. Because one of the bottlenecks to fat loss is not having good vein networks to actually pull the fat and take it to target tissue I can also increase type one muscle fibers which we always told not to because it going to make you weak or whatever But the fact of the matter is my type one fibers are very good at taking the lactate from my fast twitch fibers and turning that back into energy And part of this is part of that out is we taking matter and turning it into other pieces of matter, or we're getting rid of it by using it for mechanical energy or using it for heat production. So if I have, you know, glucose, fat, protein, whatever I have, I need to turn that into heat or I need to turn it into energy to get it out of my body because if I don't do that, it gets recycled. So let's say someone has low VO2 max, so they just don't transport oxygen and they can't utilize it very well and they're just out of shape. They have low lactate threshold. They have poor ability to buffer out hydrogen from the cell, which means their performance is going to go down. They're going to feel a bit fatigued all the time. Work capacity is going to be down. Well, if you think about that, as hydrogen is building up, I need to get rid of that so I can keep muscle contraction and keep glycolysis going. So your body will do that by taking NAD, which is activated B3, grabbing a couple of hydrogens, and then they reduce down to lactate using pyruvate. So I didn't mean to get on this, didn't mean to get on a biochemistry rant, but I love it. So glucose turns into pyruvate and if pyruvate is building up for some reason, well, we can reduce that down to lactate. Now, if you see here, I've taken glucose, turned it to pyruvates, started making lactate. That matter hasn't gone anywhere. It's still in your body. So in a lot of cases, I have this hypothesis that you can be in a calorie deficit on paper, but still be in an energy surplus at the cellular level because you're just recycling a lot of this stuff and it makes sense if the mitochondria gets backed up fat will leave the cell um or well acetyl-CoA will leave the cell become citrate become fatty acids and then you have to restore that right um glucose same thing but it gets turned into lactate and that lactate has to go be turned back into glucose or pyruvate or whatever it's going to do right depending corticycle type 1 fiber blah blah blah blah but if you think about that that energy potential is not gone anywhere. So you can be dieting, dieting, dieting. If you start recycling this stuff because you had poor mitochondrial health, you're still in a surplus of energy at that substrate level. So if we want to increase the oxidation that get it out of your body, good, let's increase mitochondrial volume so it can get rid of that. How do we do that? We need to make a slight imbalance between oxidation and reduction. If we can slightly skew that in favor of oxidation and build, create more free radicals, whichever free radicals, well, that stimulates some of these adaptations. If I mildly get that out of balance, that increases biochemical pathways towards mitochondrial production. I can increase angiogenesis. Great. That's going to give me better pumps, better fat transport, better nutrient transport. That's going to lower my blood pressure and lower my resting heart rate. That's just from the aerobic side. I can also look at resistance training. What type should I do? Well, you know, if your metrics are bad, we might think about higher rep stuff, giant sets, tri sets, unilateral stuff, because we want to lower any type of internal vascular pressure. So if you have high blood pressure, well, unilateral, lots of reps, lots of time under tension, more metabolic style work, and that will build localized aerobic enzymes, which also help the mitochondria work better. You'll build more red blood cells through this process. So there's nothing mind blowing about doing aerobics. There's nothing mind blowing about doing higher reps, but what we teach is why you would do that and when you would do that and how you predict improvement of health and then improve performance and then improve physique. So we, we came up with a kind of our tagline is health over performance. And so if you look at our health industry, isn't a health industry, it's a beauty industry. Everybody's so focused on looking more beautiful. They just kind of throw health out the window to do that. But if you get your body healthier and then you focus on performance, guess what? Your physique will change in the manner that you want it to because it's function over form. OK, function of health, get that better function on performance, get that better. good your physique will now form itself based on those two overlying principles all right that's my uh my little biology biochemistry lecture for today and and i'm smiling here because like you know there's coaches that are they'll be watching or listening and they're like what the fuck did he just say now i was the same way guys trust me if you don't

understand what Luke just talked about, take the course, because now not only do I understand this, and I wouldn't say I've mastered it, but I understand it at a level where now it makes sense. It took a while, but, but now to understand why aerobics are needed. And I think that was like one of the biggest mind blowing things was like, oh my gosh, people might, may not be able to handle carbohydrates because they don't have enough aerobic fitness. Like to understand the where and the when and the why about that is like the coolest thing ever. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, you might not be burning through a lot of energy substrate because you just have poor functioning mitochondria. You might not be burning through it because your stress is at such a high level, your body's prioritizing carbohydrates over fats for burning, which means that, you know, in a calorie deficit, I am going to lose weight, but the problem is I'm not losing it in a manner which I probably should if I can the goal is to lose fat so you can hit it with a sledgehammer just by let's just do more exercise or move more and let's take calories out or I can take a smarter approach to okay how do I influence the body to burn off the things I want it to and to save the things I don't want it to burn off how do I and how do I link that together so how do I what are the adaptations what's the specific stimulus I need to get the adaptations I need where do I put that in the program? And then that makes everything else, all the phases after a lot better. People who are in shape can train harder with their weightlifting. They can do more reps with the same amount of weight. They don't need as much rest. They build strength much faster. They sleep better. They absorb things better because their guts are better. If you have low mitochondrial output and it will, let me, let me go backwards. If you have fucked up guts, like you have bloating, indigestion, undigested food in your stool, pain in your gut, you know, people will go for, I've got SIBO or I've got, you know, fucking dysbiosis or blah, blah. Why don't you just think about this? If I don't have enough calories coming in to support survival, much less optimization, how are you gonna make gastric juices? Okay, if your ATP, your energy stores are going to keeping your brain alive, red blood cells, your immune system, your heart, your kidneys, your liver. It's trying to keep all that stuff going. And your temperature, your thermogenesis drops. That's a clear indication that your body's prioritizing ATP in order to make that for vital organs to keep your ass alive, because your body thinks you're fucking starving to death. Your body doesn't give a shit about making HCL, pepsin, pancreatic enzymes, bile. It doesn't care about that stuff right now. So you're going to have a much dampened ability to make that stuff, which is probably why you're bloated and gassy and slow transit time and why you can't digest meat effectively or why you have SIBO or why you have dysbiosis. Most of the time, if we just get people in shape, their guts get massively better and they sleep more. So they get massively better. So I think that before anybody goes on the supplement farm and grabs a bunch of gut stuff and they go do it, they run a gut panel and they run a fucking organic asses and they run all this other shit because somebody's overcomplicating the process. If you just focus on the basics, get in shape first, that will probably rectify a good 60 to 80% of your issues. And if there's still another 20, 25%, okay, now let's go get some labs. Let's go do a stool analysis. Let's go do an organic asses. Let's do a genetic test. Do that when you got your ducks in a row. like last night one of the reasons why i didn't sleep much this i was stayed up too late um because i ran a genetic panel for myself i haven't run one since 2016 i know there's a lot more research into it so i took my 23andme data ran it through uh software and i was going through it and saying okay um i see where some i've got some polymorphisms i might need to take care of because i got i sent you my labs the other day so you could have a look at it my fucking iron is out of control well i've been eating shit tons of red meat, my digestion has not been that great. And it should be for what I eat. I also wanted to confirm why my ADD is so bad. And this report did it. But in the report, I started, I started seeing some key markers of things I might need to work out like some IBS, or IBD potential. I started looking at, you know, some iron snips and my ADD snips to saying, okay, so maybe i need to start adding in a few things here and maybe reduce a couple of things over here and then go get my labs in 12 weeks and see if that affects me but holy shit my add i have i have over i have over 72 snips related to impulse like an inability to control impulse and behavior control and hyperactivity disorder um uh problem with authority like all this shit And I'm like, that made a lot of sense when I was growing up, made a lot of sense. Thank, thank God for modern amphetamines. I take my Vyvanse and I'm good. I'm not a maniac. Oh my God. I, I, I'll want to see that. Cause that's actually fascinating to me, but, but you're right. I think a lot of people, when shit doesn't work, they're very quick to do the latest test or, you know, someone said, do this test or whatever. I remember the day you told me to have whey protein. Like, I think it was two years ago. I was terrified. I came to Luke gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free. Like I was that person. And now I eat all the gluten. I eat bagels. I eat dairy. I have whey protein. And thank God, because it is so much more delicious than vegan protein. But I remember that because you got me eating real food, more of it. And you got me in shape. And I was like, oh my God, I have no gut issues. Like everyone who thinks that they're special delicate snowflake with all these gut issues. Granted, there are a lot of food intolerance issues that people have, but sometimes it can be rectified just by doing what your body needs you to do, which is eating more and actually making more mitochondria. It's like, it was cool. Get your body, get your body working better. Work on getting the stress down prioritizing sleep train but don't train too much train in the ways that you need right now which is why qualified coach can help you out with that um and then a lot of chew your food like a fucking adult a lot of that stuff nail all that stuff first before you start adding in a bunch of fucking tests i know people will go to the naturopath and order five thousand dollars with the test that the naturopath doesn't even know how to read um and then they'll prescribe them $5,000 a month in fucking supplements. Like, yeah, kidding me. And then they come to me when they get, they get real fucked up. They come to me and they send me all the tests. And what does your naturopath say? Well, this is what she said about these two tests, these two tests. She said, she doesn't know how to read them. I'm like, why the fuck did she order them? Those aren't cheap. And so I'm like, okay, what supplements? Okay. Get rid of everything. Keep these three things. And we're going to focus on getting you, getting your metrics and your autonomic nervous system at a good level mitochondria good level um get you fit and six eight weeks later they're like fuck i feel significantly better i'm like yeah wasn't that a lot less expensive than ten thousand dollars you paid that naturopath so i was reading a book before bed but that's too basic it doesn't sell it's not sexy you know i do i do i never do audiobooks except before bed and and the reason is because if I start reading a book, especially if I'm into it, I won't put it down. I won't put it down. So I've gotten to the point where I don't read the books for pleasure before bed. I'll get in bed, turn the lights out and I'll put an audio book on and I'm out in like five minutes. You're not into the serial killers like me and Zoe? Fuck that. Did I ever tell you what happened when she read the Marilyn, or not the Marilyn Manson. That'd be funny. She read the Charles Manson book? No. so I can't remember what the book is it's like the most famous Charles Manson book and it's apparently it's fucking terrifying um she was scared shitless and when we were in our old apartment which our old apartment was it was tiny it was like living in a fucking tackle box and our one single bathroom was right outside of the bedroom door so she wakes up at like I don't know midnight or one o'clock she has to pee she wakes me up because she's scared because she went to bed rigging this book she goes so I was like she just fucking woke me up so I went and hid behind the door when she came in I scared her oh no okay I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever seen my wife cry okay and we've been together over six years now she cried at her wedding I cried at the wedding um I've made her cry for doing dumb shit probably two times and then the time I scared her and I was like I'm never doing that again because she was lost her fucking mind and I felt so bad oh my god oh she and I always exchanged like the best titles like I told her to buy the Jeffrey Dahmer one because that one was talk about what I don't know it's white white women love to read about this shit no I I read I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi So I read a lot of fantasy because what I like about that too is like nerds, nerds have philosophy all figured out. So if you get in some really good fantasy, there's always a bunch of really good lessons that are underlying of how you should act towards other people and also how you should not act. So that's why I really find a lot of inspiration in, in old fantasy stuff. that cool I like the serial killer stuff because I mean I don know I can explain it I just I can explain it The more fucked up the more intriguing it is And I don't know. I took criminology classes just for fun because it just was, I don't know. It's intriguing. I think a couple of years ago, I posted on Facebook about, I don't know if this is just a white woman thing, but why do all the white women I know, they get into this, all this serial killer documentaries books all this shit and i probably had three black friends women that were like oh i like that shit too and it was just full of like 150 white ladies like oh yeah fucking frothing like cannibalism and eating people's faces and wearing their faces and i was like what the fuck oh yeah oh yeah domers that's so fucking weird yeah i don't know i can't explain it but it's fascinating well this has been an amazing two hours so i don't know what else to say but other than thank you what are you doing it's pablo hey pablo he's just he's just looking out just zoe zoe left for the gym to go work and he'll just sit here and he'll just hang out on the ledge and wait for her it's really fucking sad so cute i like when he humps daisy that's really fun to watch too yeah that's funny he goes through these spurts where um you know he couldn't care less and he goes through a few days where it's like i don't know if he's got some type of cycle or something is he just he's like i'm like bro she's she's like 10 times your size it's not gonna happen and he tries to stick it in place it doesn't even go he's like humping her in the side of the head, the shoulder, and she just sits there and takes it. She does. She's the best. Hopefully I get to meet them one day in person next year. One day, one day, one of these days. Well, if somebody wants to sign up for the program design course, how do they go about doing that? They should email us at info at muscle nerds.net. Yeah. So that's the best way of doing it. And then we can set up if they want, you know, if they want to talk more about it, we'll send the syllabus and all that if they want to talk more about it we're happy to get on and kind of explain things to them um with like myself or shane or ben or zoe will get online and kind of do a salesy type thing but i find it by the time i get somebody on those calls it's pretty much sold itself we haven't even had to get on one of those like for four weeks we just had people jumping into the course without even talking to anybody so i'm like all right that's cool that's less shit i gotta do but i'm happy to get on and chat for you know 30 40 minutes if somebody wants to get clarification on what it is but it's like you said it's it's it is unlike anything you're going to see it's you pay for it one time you basically have lifetime access you can go through as many times as you want um and there's a forum for question answers we have fortnightly calls during the intakes and i i gotta find a different name for it because we don't really do intakes anymore once covid hit we just opened it up and said fuck it people have time to study and that's been a lot better. The intakes are, I think, three a year, and we go through 12 weeks where we have fortnightly calls. So I might do Q&A, or we might have surprise lectures. If there's some cool stuff I've been working on, I might put a presentation together. We have a lot of laughs, a lot of dick jokes, and shit like that. And then all those calls are recorded and timestamped. So I think we've got to have like 120 to 140 hours of phone calls alone. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, man, people want to jump into it. I can promise you this. If you're the type of person who does a lot of courses, this will probably be the only course once you jump into it, you'll need to do for the next few years because there's that much shit to go over. And probably the average, I think people need to go through from what students have told me at least four to five full cycles before all the pieces start to fit and it's good networking too man just 400 and i think 430 or 40 coaches on there from all over the world and uh so there's i like it because we're trying to build this community where um kind of like what we had at the old company i worked at before it turned before charles left there was a really good like really awesome culture there and then it just fizzled out after he left and we want to try to rebuild that and um you know one of the great things for coaches is if you're if you are let's say you get a client you have no idea what to do with them maybe you're an Australian you get a baseball player from America and you're like what the fuck is baseball is that like cricket you're like well kind of it's like and maybe you're maybe you get a baseball pitcher it's Tommy John and you're trying to keep him having surgery like you may not understand baseball or baseball pitching or Tommy John there going to be somebody on that form that can help you out I can help you out Somebody else can help you You always got access to Charlie He probably the expert out of all of us on shit like that. So it's like, I think people don't understand the value of that, of getting into an active community where everybody's on the same path and there's no turds. I've only had to blacklist three people and kick them out of the program. So I think out of 440 people. That's, that's amazing. And then when the world opens up, we'll go back to our in-person. So everybody gets one in-person. That's where we do all the practical stuff and hang out. And you can come to anyone in the world. Like Krista came to the one in Amsterdam, which I like, I like the one in Amsterdam because I like eating the mushrooms, but I highly recommend that one. I want to make it to that. I was going to comment on that. If you didn't bring it up, is like the friendships that I've made through this. And the cool part about the networking, like someone asks the question, nobody's a dick in the forum. And if anything, we're always like celebrating what people do because people post like progress photos or stories about how they've helped clients using the methods you've taught us. And it's really cool to see. Cause it's like, I know what it's like to have that. Like, you know, you're like, oh my God, like it's clicking. And then you see it happen in a client. And when it starts working and you're like, oh my God, that works. Like Luke's not lying to me. Oh my God. Like it works. Yeah. Bex, she posted one a few weeks ago. She's like, look, I never, I never do this. I don't feel confident posting, but this is my client. Everybody's like, holy shit, way to go. Badass. You know, it's a super supportive, nonjudgmental situation. Because if somebody is a dick, I can, I promise you, I can be a bigger dick than you. You may have a bigger dick than me, but I can be a bigger dick than you can. and uh and and i'm daddy on there so yeah daddy's got to put you in the corner i'm gonna put your ass in the corner so we don't have we don't have any turds in there it's fucking fantastic yeah like krista will be at the olympia this weekend so we're gonna meet up and like you know i've i've formed friendship with the girls in australia i haven't been able to hang with them but that's like first on the list when the world opens up like it's just a cool community especially when when I didn't have any training in um polyquin methods or anything I didn't know anybody and just like the relationships alone and because it's so welcoming it's like a cool place to be and the the forum is active year-round like you don't have to wait for the phone calls to happen or anything so yeah yeah yeah 100 and that's that we wanted to create something where people actually learned that we create something that wasn't about money like obviously you've got to in order to keep a business, you have to have money coming in. So I have to trade the service. You have to have some type of compensation to keep everything going, but we never wanted the focus to be about that. So it's probably the worst business idea ever is it gives my lifetime access, lifetime support, keep adding stuff to it, never take anything away. It's really dumb because some people would be like, well, fuck, you should just make like, you can make 10 courses out of that course and charge this way. You can make this much. I'm like, yeah, but it's not about the money. It's about getting coaches better so they help their clients get better. And we'll run it as long as people sign, as long as people keep signing up, we can keep running it. If people stop signing up, then I guess I'm just going to be fucking in the hole every year trying to keep the, keep the train going. But so far we've been really blessed that, that we've got a steady stream of coaches that are hearing it. And it's all word of mouth, like you, we never, we hardly ever advertise. might throw up a thing on Instagram, but we don't do any, we don't pay $50,000 a year for social media marketing. And everyone that comes in and says, Hey, my buddies did this course. And he said, I got to do this. So just sign up, boom. And then that guy gets two people. And then, you know, now everybody's buddies are in there and they can all talk about it, study together with it. But it's, it's, it's been, it's blown away. I've been blown away with it. And I've been also blown away by the coach's desires to want to get deep into how this shit actually works so that they pick the right things to do and and most importantly what do i not do because that's probably the most important thing is what should i not do with people okay cool now that i'm not to do that and i won't fuck anybody up what should i do to get them there fast okay do this yeah and it's not do this exercise it's take this approach you know so it's real education It's also like, well, what do you think you should do? Well, that's what I'm asking you. Yeah, but I want to know, like a teacher, a good teacher doesn't just hand you the information. A good teacher will challenge you to try to figure it out for yourself, but will give you hints and tidbits and move you towards that. That way you understand how to find information for yourself in the future. And then you come on the forum and say, hey, this is what I found. What do you guys think? Yeah, that works. But also look this up because this works as well. Oh, cool. Thanks. Boom.

I mean, priceless, priceless. Like you're stuck with us forever. All right. Thank you so much, Luke. I really appreciate you coming back on and hope you guys enjoyed that action packed two hours and eight minutes. It's a long, long time to last.