Is TRT The Holy Grail For Body Building?

# Is TRT The Holy Grail For Body Building?

**Channel:** Alphagenix Podcast
**Published:** 2024-05-22
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=7MJjZTkc_W4

Welcome to the AlphaGenics podcast, where every week we talk to incredible guests from around the world of biohacking, well-being, men's health and more. Here's your host, co-founder of AlphaGenics, Ross Tompkins. Well, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome today's guest, Luke Lehman, all the way from Australia and founder of Muscle Nerds. Welcome, Luke. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to it we met last year at the Silverback Summit in Austin and absolutely loved your presentation it was super inspiring really interesting and it's taken us six months hasn't it to get together and get you on the show but I really appreciate you yeah busy we're both busy so it's been kind of back and forth finally did it we finally got there absolutely I'd rather be busy than bored yeah same so for anyone who hasn't heard of luke lemon lehman um who is luke how did you get started and what is a muscle nerd well yeah good good question the origin story it's always the origin story right um it's like a marvel movie um except i'm no superhero wish i was but um so like I got my start when I was very young. So I'm, I'm living in Australia now, but I'm, I'm originally from Texas, not far from where we're in Austin. So if you go about an hour away, way out in the country, I'm from a little small country town. And so as every young man in Texas is expected to, I had to play gridiron football. And so we got started early because in a small town like mine, we grew up with less than 7,000 people in the town. So there was nothing to do. Like you're, you're either fighting or playing sports or, you know, I, I was in the, I'm kind of in that weird, that zennial generation where we just started having like technology in the home. So I was born without it, but I got it very early. So, you know, Nintendo and all that type of stuff, but we weren't really interested in that too much in the country playing, playing football. So started lifting weights when I was like eight years old to get ready for that and sneaking into the into the high school in the junior high when I wasn't supposed to and lifting weights and at about 14 is when we finally got the internet so this is 1992 and that opened the world to me because up to that point everything that I was studying was only what I could find in our local library so it was like Jane Fonda books and like really crappy workout books from like the 60s and 70s. But when I got the internet, that opened up Charles Poliquin, who later became my mentor, and I became somewhat of a protege and took over parts of his job when I worked for his company later in life. And Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all these guys, like the heavyweights that were there before the industry was what it was. And so I got my start fairly early, started competing in powerlifting, football, baseball, track and field, basically everything you could possibly play. and then later I had the opportunity I'd never been out of Texas really I'd only been out of Texas a couple of times by the time I was in my mid-20s and I had the opportunity to go and basically do a do a seminar I attend a seminar by Charles Poliquin who if people don't know who that is he's deceased now but he was considered one of the world's like leading strength and conditioning coaches in the world and so I went to a few seminars kept going kept up communication started working for him and that was my start in the strength conditioning and personal training realm and at the time I think at 19 is when I first started actually training people I just turned 46 so I've been doing it a very long time and when I got into the industry it was one of those things where it was almost laughable like there were only a bunch of weirdos like me that were actually being personal trainers it didn't it wasn't a real job back then and like my parents laughed at me and my mom told me it would always be a hobby. I'd never make a career out of it. And now it's like the hottest thing. Everybody wants to be a personal trainer, you know? So yeah, so all that. And then I met my wife, which is why I moved to Australia. And I left Poliquin Group, which is Charles's old company and had no job and started Muscle Nerds. And it was something I had on a back burner. So I was working on it just in case I wanted to leave or I got fired or whatever happened. And so I'd been kind of working on it, just getting stuff set up. with my wife and then yeah so I was kind of just thrown into it and we looked at each other and go okay well what are we gonna do we didn't have a dime like when I left that company she and I met in Australia and two and a half months later she quit both of her jobs sold her car and flew to America to be with me and yeah we had no money so we like what are we gonna do so I made an announcement online and i got inundated with hundreds of messages of people can you come to a seminar here we don want what you used to do we want new stuff uh can i train with you can we do this so i was like oh shit so it got really it got real real quick and uh we just kind of got thrown into basically building a company and didn't know what the hell we were doing and still kind of don't know what doing and it's been almost 10 years. I love that what a fantastic story um it's I'm exactly the same age as you um 46 as well I am a physiotherapist by background and what's really interesting is I trained in the late 90s and obviously physios we think we are well we're trained to think you know we're experts in musculoskeletal system but the extent of our exercise um experience and teachings at university is to do three sets of 10 of pretty much anything and that's it and then we're off into the world and all of a sudden then you you open up to people like poliquin and yourself and check and you're like oh my god i know nothing so it was super eye-opening for me it's it's interesting because like even even here in australia like i do manual therapy i have massage certifications. I have fascial stretch therapy. I've done like FRC. I've done a GUSQ clinic. I've done all this stuff, right? And learning stuff from Charles and other people in the industry. When I came over, I was talking to some physios here and apparently in a lot of the universities here in Australia, they don't believe in manual therapy anymore. They're just like, just give people these exercises. Don't put your hands on them. It doesn't work. Stretching doesn't work this doesn't work you just do uh open cans and clamshells and they'll be all right and the thing is it some of that stuff will work especially if you have like occupational injuries or like life injuries if you get a sports industry like a sports injury some of that stuff they athletes need bigger things and sometimes you have to put your hands on it but unfortunately a lot of that's been phased out so basically all the stuff i've learned from charles and uh charles Paul Check and some of the other guys, like that really made me very valuable with how I was taking people and fixing them because A, using that, like the low return on investment stuff, like open cans and things like that, no one's going to do them. It's like, I would have clients and I'm like, okay, what'd your physio say? Okay, cool. That's, I agree with that. Okay. What'd they try to do? All these exercises. Cool. How are they working? They're not working. I go, cool. How many sessions have you done it's been like four weeks i think i did them twice and stopped and i'm like why do you think they're not working so we had to figure out we had to figure out things they would actually do and do it in the workout while we had them with us and it's just nuts like you have people that won't do their rehab exercises and then you have there is a big disconnect between like not just anatomy but applied anatomy and functional anatomy and how it helps to work everything in a like a chain of muscles instead of just trying to isolate a certain area and i think that's where trainers that have a good knowledge of that and physios pair up really nicely because they each have bits and bobs that work okay separately but work really well when they're fitted together so we tell all of our students is don't try to fix it so you're not physios you're not doctors build a referral network and try to combine your forces let's make this like the avengers and everybody gets together and they does they do their bit and they talk each other's language and you get to go to fix people but we're in this um weird time in the industry where everybody wants to be the lone wolf and nobody wants to be in a wolf pack anymore for some reason yeah it's strange isn't it because i'm a big believer in if you want to go fast go alone but if you want to go far go together and this collaboration this you know when we are there to help the person in front of us our client and i think that collaborative approach works really well and just to expand on a couple of things you mentioned there there is this big change in in physiotherapy at the moment where it's very hands-off you sit on the other side of a desk and give them a sheet of paper because this is this is what the research says but my problem with that is science is always changing so we that is just based on some papers now maybe we can't have the right papers that prove that manual therapy works because we have thousands of years worth of anecdotal evidence to say that it's helpful yeah the other part of that which you touched on there is when you put your hands on someone it really helps to build rapport it helps helps to build trust, helps to build the relationships. So then when you say, I need you to do these exercises every hour not once a week or once every three weeks you gotta do these often because you trying to undo months or years worth of deconditioning You not going to do that in five minutes You have to do it often enough. And if you've got a good relationship and maybe manual therapy helps to boost that, they're more likely to do the exercises and they're more likely to get better. Yeah. I had a fantastic physio. He's not too far from my house. and I had a Baker cyst and I just could not get, I got my knee hyperextended in jujitsu and swelled up and it just would not go away. You know, the usual deal, like five or six weeks and eventually, hopefully it drains. And the first time you put some compression on it, it blows back up and it just, and then your knee feels like it's gonna explode if you try to flex your knee. And it's like, man, this thing, I can't squat, I can't lunge, I can't do anything. And so I called one of my friends who's a exercise physiologist. He goes, go see this guy. He's two blocks from your house. Go see him. And I went and he did it all. He was like, look, we're going to use any tool I think is going to work. So he was like hands on. We were on force plates. We were doing exercises. They have a full setup. And it's the whole thing. And then a treatment plan on an app that he made sure I was doing or he'd call me and yell at me for not doing my exercises like that. Like that's the way to me. That's the way it should be done. Right. And having some some accountability after the fact. without a doubt because there are you know 24 hours in a day seven days a week you could see your PT or your physiotherapist once a week for an hour but there's still six days and 23 hours where it's what you do that really makes a difference that's it that's it like you say you're not going to fix it with one session you're going to have to accumulate some some repetition and get it done but definitely so what so where do you stand on the you know how much emphasis do you put on strength training and how much on cardio depends it depends on the situation right so kind of like that uh what we just talked about like you may have somebody that just needs to do rehabby exercise maybe they just need to work the scapula maybe they just need to do internal external rotation, whatever. Maybe someone actually needs someone to physically put their hands on and mobilize that first and teach their brain that these are okay positions and show them where the problem is and how they get out of pain, right? So when we go to things like strength training and we go to things like conditioning, it's the same deal. You do a needs analysis. Where's the client? What is the tool that's going to make the most sense? Whether that's cardio, whether that's strength training, whether that's stretching, whether that's dedicated mobility work, whatever that may be. So it's always a flow chart, right, for me. So it's like, okay, I have to look at my client and go, can I have four or five different directions? I have 100% resources. Where do I put each of those percentages? So if I have, for example, somebody comes in and they're massively morbidly obese, get guy and he's 400 kilos, 300 kilos. That's big. Okay. And a lot of, a lot of personal trainers that go, well, they just need to lift weights and diet. Okay. That dude doesn't fit on most of the equipment and he's never trained before. And he's so massively inflamed that his perception of, uh, of pain is going to be very, very high. So he's going to get doms. He's not going to enjoy working out, you have to give him the low hanging fruit stuff. That's not going to make him feel bad. First, let's get some weight off of them and then slowly integrate in other things. It's like everybody can walk or at least almost. And if they're so big, they can't walk. Great. We can sit in a chair and we can squeeze the muscles for time. We can sit in the chair and we can get a little, one of those little bikes that sits on the ground. He can just pedal stuff that's going to be low impact. The dude just needs to get moving. If we can get him moving and get some momentum, we can start lifting weights later, right? But now let's look at the complete opposite. Maybe we have somebody comes in and they're skinny fat. They just don't have any muscle. Cardio is probably not going to be the answer for them. The answer is going to be probably learning how to apply tension to the muscles with some external load and starting to build some muscle to then reappropriate their muscle to fat ratio. Somebody comes with a high blood pressure. Take somebody with high blood pressure, stage 2 hypertension. They walk in, they've got 150 over 95 or 150 over 100. Best thing to do, let's go put them on the leg press and really jack that blood pressure up. Or how about 5x5 back squats? These are the things you've got to think about before you put somebody under some type of task. What are the consequences, both positive and negative? You can meet people where they're at, don't you? And do you think there are there seems to be more and more courses popping up to become a trainer You know some of them are like a day online or something like that and I mean what do you think I guess of that type of training and is there a danger that people are coming out that don't have that understanding oh there's so many so many avenues you could talk about there I mean number one it's not difficult to become a trainer like in America it's ridiculously easy I got my trainer certification in a two-day workshop now you had a lot of homework and stuff that you had to do. And I had great teachers. Like one of my teachers was Tom Platz, who, if you know who that was, the golden, the golden Eagle, like basically quadzilla back in the sixties and seventies or seventies and eighties. Right. He was a very well-known bodybuilder. And then Dr. Fred Hatfield, which is a very, very well-known power lifter. Like I did have some good teachers, but it still was not that you, you go and you take a test, you pass the test test, not that hard to pass. Right. So basically anybody could do it. My mom could do it for God's sake. She doesn't know anything about working out. And not that much has changed. There are countries like Australia is a bit more, a bit more dialed in with it. You get your cert three, four, you do apprenticeship type stuff. It takes, you know, a couple of months. You can't just do it in a weekend, but, but they still only teach you the most basic stuff. So they only teach you enough to be pretty dangerous. And that's where continuing education comes into play, which is what I do after the fact. It's like, go get your certification and come talk to me. I'll tell you what to do next. And there's two components of that. One of those, which is like designing programs. People don't understand like designing programs is both science and art. So we have a huge never-ending program design course that we built with 140 hours of content. Former people ask questions, we answer them. We continue to upgrade it every now and then. So it's stuff like that. So whether it's us or whoever you go to, somebody who actually knows they're talking about knows how to put together a program because the first thing you need is a plan the second part is you need to have experience under the bar like you need to train people but it's also common right now everybody wants to be an online trainer because they think it's easy like it's big cash cow it's easy if you're not doing it right but you have guys that are 21 they've never trained a single person in their life they've been training themselves for 18 months and now they're going to train people online like how are you going to do that yeah they don't have they don't have the knowledge no knowledge no experience they they have no coach's eye they can't watch a video and tell somebody where they're screwing up they have no idea no clue it's insanity right now you have i guess it's similar in many areas of business in the world but you have a lot of business coaches that have set up as well and all i've done is read a book they've never started a company grown a company sold a company acquired another one and they're like i'm gonna teach you how to grow yours you're like how i think i read a book okay yeah um yeah i read a lot of newsletters yeah yeah exactly yeah it's a funny world that we live in and so do you focus uh just on training trainers now or do you still have your own clients too no i still have my own clients um i was trying to get out of coaching people a while back but then i ended up uh two coaches decided that were underneath me decided to go do something else so i ended up inheriting like 40 clients overnight which was an absolute disaster for about a year and a half. But yeah, I still got down to about two dozen clients or so. But between myself. You still love it though every day. I do. I love it. I love it because the clients I have now are really good. I don't like training people. I don't like training beginners. Like if someone is a beginner intermediate, we train you, but it's not me. It ends up being like my protege, my mini me, which is my coach, Max. Like he's, he is 100% my mini me. And, uh, he's the guy, like, he's the guy that does most of the training. I take people like, like Allie, I take people who are really advanced people who are pro athletes, UFC fighters, things like that, or people who are just massively messed up, like pretty much like I'm not a physio. Right. Uh, but it's kind of like physio type things. And I work with our physios, but it's like, we, we try to think outside of the box. How do we fix this really fast with big stuff and make sure it doesn't come back so they can progress and get out of pain yeah i love that yeah and switching things up a little bit one of the things you spoke about quite a lot at the silverback was about performance enhancement where does that fit into i guess current personal training is it something that's you know is it everywhere is it just a small percentage is it a good thing is it a bad thing let's dive into that we're talking about uh supplemental performance enhancement yes yeah the good old the romanian creatine yeah man like i'm a huge fan i'm a huge fan i i grew up

doing powerlifting national level um not bodybuilding i did men's bikini which is like like men's physique where you wear the board shorts and you go up there you do the posing and all that but like i've been in the bodybuilding world for a long time and powerlifting world strongman world i've competed in all the above and um you're not if you're going to compete at a high level you're not going to compete without something now we're probably that being said that's a bit more extreme than probably what you're talking about but i think if we're going to talk about TRT, we also have to talk about that as well, right? Because you see both of it. I messed myself up pretty bad in my 20s and was hypogonadal by the time I was 35, 36, and I was on TRT. In America, it was super easy for me to get. They look at your labs and go, cool, here you go, testcipionate. Awesome. Let's start at 120, see how you go. I think I ended up at 160, 180 a week. And I was in the top of the third quartile. Perfect. Felt awesome. But man, over here in Australia, forget about it. Forget about it. I went into a doctor's office for a throat infection. And he wanted me, he said, when's the last time you did your labs? I said, well, I did it in November. So it had been like three months ago. Well, I want you to run some more labs. I'm like, cool. I said, don't worry about writing. Don't write a script for it. I'll do a private labs because I'm going to order far more stuff than you're ever going to order for me. And I'm gonna have to pay cash anyway. So I might as well do it myself. And he goes, well, like what? Like, well, I'm going to do testosterone, bioavailable testosterone. I'm going to do estradiol. I'm going to do all this stuff. And he goes, do you have low testosterone? I go, yeah. I said, I've been hypogonad. I'm supposed to be on TRT. I haven't been on TRT in like 10 years because no doctors over here will give it to me. And he looks at my arms and he goes, I don't think you need it. I go, bro, it has nothing. I'm in my forties. It has nothing I'm not, it has nothing to do with, this isn't steroids. This isn't competition. I just want to have a healthy libido, sleep better, less depression or less, not depression, but less, you know, the sadness you get with low testosterone. I want to get a, you know, I want to get a boner that a dog couldn't chew and a cat can't scratch. You know, that's, that's what I'm looking for. And he's like, no, I don't think you need it. And I'm like, great. So I've found two or three doctors. No, not even an option for me because I look like I don't need it. Although my labs show a whole different story. That's absolutely crazy, isn't it? And is it still like that? Yeah, it's still like that. You have to jump through hoops. So basically, you know, your options, I need to talk, I need to talk to our boy Dave, because I know he can get it. But you know what, man, it's just, it's just been, you get so busy, you just forget, right? and uh i've talked to some other clinics and they're like hey what do you want and they're wanting to give me all kinds of stuff i go i just want testosterone man i just want i just want i just want a little bit of primo testing just a little bit just enough to get me in the middle of the range i don't care anything so i don't have the testosterone of a 200 year old man and then they want to go oh you want some anivar you want wenstron i'm like no no no i just want just nor i don't even want sports trt i just want trt yeah yeah i just want to feel back to where you should yeah yeah i think i think it was you some someone at the summit said something really fascinating which is a lot of people jump to the steroids when there's zero point doing that until you've maxed out your own natural trt and then your supplemental trt because what's the point yeah absolutely and i have this conversation with a lot of both young men and also old men for two different reasons. So like the young guys want to get on it and like, look, you guys, I, I, they're like, well, you started taking your 21. I was like, yeah, but I was already lifted for 13 years. And I was at like the, I was already at the top of my genetic limit. And so I was competing in powerlifting. So it was either lose or show up to a gunfight with a gun. So that's why I did it because I had a choice because I'm six foot tall at 220 pounds or 240 pounds. So I think I was in the two, two 42s. I was having to compete with guys that were five foot eight, five foot six. So mechanically I'm at a massive disadvantage. So you have two choices. You either get really fat, get a huge gut, shave your head, grow goatee and start listening to Satan Thrasher music like the rest of them, or you get on gear and you keep your abs and you look good and you feel good. I'm like, which one, which one is the least healthy option? And when I took PEDs, I didn't take a lot. Like I was one of those guys. I just took, I took nonstop, but very low dose, which is probably worse. Right. So, um, I wasn't the kind of guy that was taking like three grams of gear like everybody else I was taking very low doses I just took it for way too long But but yeah so I tell them I like look don you want to see what you can get done naturally and optimize that first? And if you want to progress in competition, then get on things and make that choice at that time when you've earned the right to do it. Right now for the Older guys, I get guys all the time like, should I get on gear? I'm like, no, you're 35% body fat. I reckon if we got you to 15% body fat, your testosterone will probably go up. You also drink like two cartons of beer all week. That's definitely screwing up your testosterone. You don't sleep. You go to bed drunk. You wake up at odd times. You go to bed at odd times. You work 70 hours a week. You get terrible toxic relationships everywhere. You get a lot of other stuff you need to fix. we can probably fix it with lifestyle stuff and nutrition and then maybe some supplementation. And if we can't, okay, now maybe you talk to the doctor, but I don't think like I, I firmly believe that fat, fat guys, especially should not do testosterone. What about the argument that, that let testosterone is so low that they can't get motivated to get started. Is there started, is there an argument and say, actually that could, could inject some, I guess, motivation and get them spiraling in a positive way? I think if we're going to, if we're going to, and that's not a bad, I mean, that that's a good thought process, right? However, I personally think it should be on a trial type of thing. We'll start it with three months. If you don't get your lifestyle and shit together within three months and show me some progress, we're done. And you can find a different doctor, right? Because if they just take it and are like, Ooh, I'm feeling a bit better and they're not doing anything with it, they're probably never going to, right? It's just like, it's like going to a general practitioner and your cholesterol is high, your blood pressure is high and you go, well, I'll just take an ACE inhibitor and a diuretic and I'll take an antihypertensive. Oh, great. My numbers look awesome. No, your numbers only look good with the drugs. Your numbers need to look good without it. Those should be band-aids until you get your shit together and get, get it until you can get off of it right those things shouldn't be an all the time thing unless it's a genetic issue and and you just you didn't win the genetic lottery yeah yeah the genetic lottery um i think that we live in such a fast-paced world where people just want a quick fix you know that everything's on a plate now isn't it like you get food delivered to your house you get anything you want delivered to your house i think people just want something now so this idea that you know i can take pds or sport trt or whatever and all of a sudden in their head they're like i don't need to do any work and i'm just going to end up looking like you know a pro athlete i think that comes into it doesn't it it does it does it's like it guys it doesn't work like that it doesn't you still have to do the work like um i remember a famous quote by louis simmons of west side barbell when people were talking smack about the guys at west side being on gear he said look i've never seen a bottle of testosterone squat 800 pounds right you still you still have to do the work i mean when i when i was in texas because because we're such close proximity to mexico it was very easy to get steroids in texas i reckon and this is 20 years ago i reckon at least 50 to 60 percent of the guys in the gym we're on gas i reckon and i reckon now it's probably 75 80 percent now and none of them know what they're doing none of them have any idea what they're doing hell a lot of the doctors i talk to don't even know what they're doing right and it's like like i said like if you if if you have somebody who's really overweight like it's significantly overweight what's what's the likelihood that that testosterone is going to aromatize anyways and be completely useless and give them estrogenic side effects and create further health problems. So it's like, what's the solution? Well, we'll give them a Remedex. Cool, now you fuck up their cholesterol. Excellent. And what happens when you get off your Remedex? They get this massive estrogen backlash and they feel like a bag of dicks. Wouldn't it be better to make an agreement and say, look, let's try to get the weight off first. If you need the motivation, we'll start with a low dose. But if you don't get at least X number of kilos off within the three to four month range, we're done. Like, I think that's fair. And that gives them the incentive to actually do something about it. Yeah. It's a, it's a tool in your toolbox, isn't it? It's like, but if you've got, yeah, if you've got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. So you can't like, I'll just have more of that and that'll fix it. No, you've got to fix your lifestyle. You've got to be eating right. Doing the right exercise. Yeah And they need to look the sub the testosterone is a supplement It not the it not the cornerstone It an additive And it like it would be like buying a piece of shit car and putting race fuel in it. Why? Like the car's not going any faster. It's just going to blow up. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's, you said something interesting a moment ago as well see this all the time which is you hear people say oh they're they're taking steroids that's why they look that way and you're like it doesn't quite look like that they're not sitting on the sofa injecting whatever and they wake up the next day look like that that takes discipline that takes hard work that takes an amazing like yeah discipline to eat right get to the gym get good sleep it's not magic like yeah but there's this misinterpretation of it i guess And none of it's magic. It's just repetition of things you probably don't want to do to get a body you want. It's like, if I want to buy something that's really expensive, I don't want to spend the money on it. But if I really want that, I'm going to have to work hard, accumulate the cash, and then buy the thing that I want to buy. Building physics the same way. It's just that it's not cash you're playing with. The resource is time. It just takes time and patience and just repeatedly nailing the basics over and over and telling, not really telling other people no, because that's never the problem. The problem is telling yourself no, because at the end of the day to building a nice physique is so heavily dominated by nutrition. Like you don't even need that much weight training to build a nice physique. But if you want to get lean and you want to build muscle, you have to nail the diet. And that's the hardest thing for people. Because like you said, Uber Eats, there's always a celebration. And they don't know when misses a celebration you know and some people think that a celebration is every day that ends in y it's like bro like there is but it's like you you also deal with these these idiots who the anti-dieting culture and they're like diets don't work diets do work if you stick to the fucking diet and look at the diet as a lifestyle modification like of course if you go back to what made you fat you're just going to get fat again but if you stick to the fundamentals of what got you lean guess what's going to keep you lean ain't mcdonald's it's exactly what got you lean but they look at it like disordered eating and tracking's disordered eating and all this it's not they're all tools they're all tools it just depends on how you frame it but the biggest demon that people face is within themselves it's the inability to tell themselves no when they want something really bad yeah yeah absolutely you hear quite a lot of that nowadays don't you like it's genetic why somebody's overweight and it's not a ball and all of those things and you're like pretty sure if you don't put it in your mouth you're not going to put weight on yeah and look the thing is like the thing is genetics are about 25 of it 75 of your genetics you have absolute control over depending on the choices you make so when i was when i was younger when I was 15, I had a massive underbite and I had jaw surgery and they cut pieces of my jaw, moved it. And I had my jaw wired shut for six weeks. I lost 40 pounds, 40. So when people tell me, when they tell me it's not about calories and calories, I'm like, cool, let's wire your mouth shut and let's see how quickly you lose weight. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, it's like the glp-1 agonist isn't it it's like if it was genetic when you had that it would make no difference they actually may take manjaro or azempic and they lose weight and you're like well if it was in your genes it would make no difference you could look at you could look at some of the older real nefarious drugs like adipex but you take adipex you're basically on freaking speed all the time and you don't want to eat people lose tremendous amount of weight right but you know go look at it you've never have you ever seen a fat crackhead or fat meth head no yeah or tiny i've never seen a smoking meth because i've not really been around a lot of people smoking meth but you know what i mean yeah yeah i was gonna say like a minute you're that i used to club what do you think do you think no we know that our muscle is the largest organ in the body and there is a really high correlation to longevity your muscle is the longer your health span will be do you think there is an argument that improving muscle using low dose peds could it ever be construed as a good thing because if we improve our musculature surely there has to be a benefit there yeah 100 100 look that i mean if you look at There a really old study by Tufts University And it is they made a book out of it It like the top 10 factors for lowering all cause mortality anti and all this One of the top at the list was not losing, like being strong and not losing strength and having muscle and not losing it. Now, a lot of people, including my mentor, Charles, took this the wrong way. they took a lot of guys especially people who are biased towards weightlifting people who are biased towards bodybuilding will take this as well that paper shows that the more muscle mass you have and the stronger you are the better but that's not really what the point of it was the point was don't get sarcopenia don't lose muscle and maintain your strength for the rest of your life it wasn't you know take a hundred milligrams of anadrol and a thousand milligrams of test and and 500 milligrams a trend and get as big and strong as humanly possible. So there's, there's all these extremes. Like the body doesn't like extremes. It likes staying somewhere in the bell curve. So it's like you have a point where you put on a bit of muscle mass. That's a good thing. You put on a ton of muscle mass at some, there's a tipping point where that's no longer actually a healthy thing to do anymore. So it's, it's, it's knowing what those, like what those tipping points are. And there was a study that came out a few years ago talking about BMI. Is BMI actually relevant? And what they said in the study was it actually still is relevant because if you look at like I'm considered I'm considered overweight based on the BMI. OK, now I'm a big dude. I'm heavy boned. I've got a lot of muscle. Being overweight with the BMI from like bodybuilding or weightlifting, whatever, not a big deal. That's part of it. But if you're in the class one, class two obesity part of BMI, you're either on a massive amount of PEDs or you're a lot fatter than you think, which neither of those things are necessarily healthy. So what we need to do is not throw BMI, like don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to put it in better context, like a new kind of version of looking at it. So if you are a guy and you're lifting weights and you're in an overweight category and you're lean, like say sub 15%, you're doing pretty good. If you start moving up to that higher class of obesity, again, you're probably taking it too far either with body fat or you're taking it too far with how much gear you're taking. And you're probably not taking TRT anymore. Yeah. Because I've never seen anybody natural that's in a class one, class two obesity with that much muscle mass. I'm sure there's a freak outlier, but I've never actually seen it. But I've seen a lot of guys who are taking tons of gear, like way too much, that definitely fit that category. And they're definitely not healthy. Yeah. yeah absolutely what what do you think is a sustainable body fat percentage for someone natural and someone who is using pds where can someone stay and you know and have that life where they can go out and do what they want and not have to just you know be super disciplined all the time yeah i mean look again it's it's it's not that difficult guys like it's the hard part is getting there. And realistically at the ranges, I'm going to say it's not that difficult. It just takes time and it takes patience. It takes a little bit of discipline, but I like keeping guys around 15% or under, which 15% is a lot leaner than people think because people go to a DEXA. 15% on a DEXA could be 18 to 21%. Like it's not actually a real 15 or they'll get down to say 10 on a DEXA. And I'm like, no, no, no. You're more like 13 to 16, somewhere around there. If you're 10 on a DEXA, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. And that is not that difficult to maintain once you get there. Like if you look at Allie, like Allie maintains this incredible shape year round. She doesn't train a lot anymore. Like we trained a lot to get there, mainly because she thought she had to. We actually had this conversation this morning. It's like she hasn't been able to train as much because she's been traveling and busy and all that. She's like, I can't believe I'm maintaining my physique. Is it because we've built to this point? I'm like, no, no, no. it's because you didn't need to train that much anyways. We only did that because psychologically you enjoyed it and you felt like it was necessary. Now you're learning that it's actually not that necessary to do the stuff we've had to do for the last six years. You can actually maintain and make improvements. They'll be slower, but you can still do it without having to dedicate like a part-time job to your training and nutrition. Right? Yeah. So, so like, I think once you get to about 12, so I'm sitting around like 12 to 14% and I maintain that pretty much year round, except over the holidays, I'll creep up to like 15, 17%. But I'll usually, if guys want to put on weight, I'll give them a range of like 12 to 17. Once we start getting a little bit past 17, I'm probably going to start doing a mini cut and dial it back down because the closer you get

20 and above the more insulin resistant you're going to get you're going to get anabolically resistant a lot more your calories are going to be biased into fat stores and away from muscles now steroids do change a lot of that so you can get away with a lot more but then you're dealing with inflammation from adipokines you're dealing with inflammation just systemic inflammation hyperimmune response which is going to lead to inflammation that's all going to lead to the higher sympathetic nervous system drive, higher levels of glucocorticoids. So the fatter you get, the more opportunity or the more preference you're going to bias towards that bulk being put in the fat instead of being put in the muscle. So you might as well just keep it at a point where it's maintainable and you're making slow progress. People try to put weight on too fast and they don't realize anabolic processes work very slowly. From an evolutionary perspective, there's no inherent benefit of being 120 kilos of 6% body fat as a hunter-gatherer. There's no evolutionary benefit. That's actually a negative thing because you're easier to hunt, right? The skinny lean dudes are going to outrun you, and you're going to get eaten by the lions. So you have to think of it in that way, and a lot of people will poo-poo that. But my point of it is we're not that biochemically, physiologically different than we were, say, 10,000 years ago. So catabolic processes work very quickly. Anabolic processes work very slowly. And it just goes for like that feast and famine during a year, right? So you live in bounty during the summertime. You eat a lot. You put on some fat. And that fat lasts you all winter. You lose all that fat during the winter. And then you go and you hunt again, right? so i think that people need to be a little bit more uh they need to be a little bit more diligent at keeping their body composition at a reasonable level and think about where you're going to be in 12 months 24 months five years instead of trying to put on two years worth of growth in 12 weeks yeah to have that longer term outlook is going to be helpful yeah rather than i want to do this i want to get ready for the you know my beach body in the summer and then they forget about it and just have that longer term discipline i guess it comes down to we've used that word a lot well and if you have that longer term outlook you can recomp over time and then you never have to get overweight or over we'll say not overweight we'll say overly fat like most of my clients that are really lean, they continue to put on muscle, but we're looking at like, can we gain 100, 150 grams of weight on average per week? Some weeks we don't gain weight, some weeks we lose, but we're looking at the average over time. And if somebody's putting on four or five kilos a year, I'm pretty happy with that. And we don't have to really clean up a lot of that body fat. That means you get to eat more longer and you never have to really do a deficit unless you have a photo shoot or you have videos or something or you have to do a, you know, be on stage. You You want to get lean? Okay, we'll do a really quick three-week cut. Catabolic systems work really fast. You can knock off a couple of percent in a few weeks and you good Yeah Where do you stand on the GLP agonist If someone creeps up to 20 would you ever consider advising that to like right come on let get this in help you get on top of your appetite? Or do you think it's not necessary? No, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I mean, we've got modern medicine to help. If you have, I have a client that's supposed to be on it. She can't get it because because her country ran out of it. So it's like, it was a godsend for her because she has a really hard time controlling her appetite and telling herself no. And it was the first time when she got on that. I advised her, her doctor said, I think we should try this. I said, it's a good idea. Get on it. Why not? Other than the fact that it's really expensive where you are. It's like, if that's what it takes for you to finally get there, because you're doing the work, you're doing the work in the gym, you're getting to sleep, you're getting your conditioning done, you're doing everything you just have a hard time with the diet use the tool you have available i'd use it if i could get it i don't even have a problem with it it's that tool in your toolbox again isn't it yeah i'd rather people take glp than clenbuterol and dnp yeah yeah absolutely it's um yeah it's an interesting one isn't it because you have a lot of the the sort of underground labs again and now making this as well but i read something online recently and it was like only 30 of the semi-glutide made by this underground lab was actually what it was supposed to be i believe it something was water some of it was something else entirely so i think if you're gonna do that you've got to get the proper stuff the kosher stuff i mean the end user doesn't know like you get a vial of pre-mixed bacteriostatic water you have no idea if it's in there or not like and like i love peptides uh bpc man that's a Personal favorite of mine is CJC 1295 Ipamorelin. That combo was the one that took away a bunch of niggles that I had for four years that I could not fix. And within two weeks, completely gone and never came back. And I would never buy that stuff underground. No way. I would trust to some point only because I can't get anything else. And like I said, I haven't been on anything in years. but I would trust underground testosterone before I would before way before I would trust underground peptides, because at least with the testosterone, you're going to have to work a little bit to make it look legit. And people talk a little bit more. And the results from that are so much faster that you can talk to somebody like, Hey, did you try this lab? And like, yeah, it was really good. I gained like four kilos in a month. I'm like, okay. So, you know, there's talk And it's cheap. Like it doesn't make any sense to make fake underground testosterone anymore because it's so cheap. Like peptides are the new thing. You're selling people a bottle of peptides for 150 bucks and it's just water. It's a great investment. Exactly. And I think because TRT, the effects, as you say, are obvious. Whereas with some of the peptides, and especially the longevity peptides, like you can't feel it and you're not supposed to. but you're taking it because there is arguments say it's gonna make you live a longer, healthier life. So you can feel that anyway So you could take that for 30 years and not take and it won make a blind bit of difference apart from your wallet which is smaller That right And if you had real there are some peptides you know, that you do feel something like, you'll feel a little rush and like, it's almost like a little mini nice and rushing, like, whoa, whoa. And you feel that, right? I had a doctor here that I get peptides from from now and again, but I haven't done any in four or five years. I'm due. One thing that I thought was crazy is when I did the CJC, epimerelin, and BPC, my gray hair went away and it turned brown for like six months. So now that I'm getting more gray, I'm like, man, I should probably do another cycle. But because I get it through a doctor, it's ungodly expensive. But at least I know it's right. But I remember he convinced me to take S22. I'm like, I didn't know anything about it. I'm like, I don't really care about testosterone. He goes, I'll just try it. I'm like, all right. it felt like i was injecting hot molten lava and i was like nah i just threw it away i was like i'll just i'll just go get some testosterone because this stuff sucks and now they're making a pill i've not heard of that what is s22 i have to look it up but it's one of it's one of the sarms and uh he's real high on it he says he sees a lot of a lot of benefits from it but i just just when you injected it it you lumped up and welted and it felt like you were injecting basically uh basically isopropyl alcohol it was not fun i was like screw that i'm not i'm out i'll do the other ones but i'm out with that one absolutely with your bbc did you put that um directly to where your niggles were or did you put it into the belly or wherever no i just put in the belly most of mine were in the ribs anyways so um i broke my ribs on this side twice and this side once. And then the second time I broke my ribs on the right side, I couldn't lift my arm up for four or five months. And I went all over the world to find somebody to fix it. A buddy of mine had just done some soft tissue stuff at some place in Florida. They do cranial stuff. And then also like really brutal, brutal types of like hands-on stuff. I was like, I'm desperate. I'll do anything. I drove four hours to see him. Somebody had to hold me down because it was so painful. I was crying, but he worked on me for an hour and I could get my arm overhead. And I was like, oh, fantastic. I went to see him one more time and we solidified it. But when I started doing jujitsu again and judo, it still would start, it would hurt. I'd do a session. I couldn't train for five days. So this doctor was right around the corner and I went and talked to him and he's like the leading guy in all of Australia for peptides. And he was like, we'll do these three things and two weeks later i was like holy shit i have no pain anymore and and i would go to class 12 to 15 hours a week and train hard no more rib pain that's incredible is there is there anything anything that we haven't covered that you think our viewers and listeners should know about you or about, I guess, exercise in general? Yeah, I mean, where do you start? There's so many things, right? So many things, and besides what we covered, it's like, I do firmly believe that if someone is gonna get TRT, the first thing they need to get set in their head is they gonna do the work other than injecting the testosterone or rubbing the cream on or rubbing the gel on They have to get it in their head that this is incredibly helpful and it life but it not going to work as well as you want it to, unless you do all the other things that you have to, which again, does not have to, doesn't mean you have to do a part-time job being a bodybuilder. You just go to the gym, three, three full body workouts a week, training hard, get your steps in, get some, just some light aerobic cardio in, like get back in shape. And a lot of, I've seen a lot of changes, just people getting them better aerobic shape because our industry, they're all like lift weights. You don't need to do cardio, but now it's changing. Like 10 years ago when I was telling everybody that you're all out of shape, you need to get more aerobic fitness. They're like, oh, you're smoking crack you don't know what you're talking about now everybody's becoming hybrid athletes because they see the changes i mean if you even look at think about this okay we're making testosterone what delivers that testosterone through the rest of your body your bloodstream you have high blood pressure you have vessels that won't dilate you have really poor blood flow one of those places is going to be to your ding dong and balls how the hell like how the hell are you going to move stuff around the body? How are you going to take care of that? I remember Charles used to talk about guys who can't get a rock hard boner. He says it's basically a heart attack for your pecker. If you can't get a good hard boner, you're probably 10 years away from having a heart attack. Yeah. I think that's pretty recognized now as a thing. Seven to eight years after that happens, you're probably going to have a cardiac event. And yet most men don't realize. Well, and most men think they're just going to inject testosterone and it's automatically going to make them horny and have a libido, but that's not true. That's not true. Like you still need to get blood flow. You still need to be able to dilate. So part of that is getting control of your resting heart rate, getting control of your blood pressure and trying to get that, trying to get into some reason about a shape. And here's the thing, you start taking testosterone and you get a big hard boner and you got about one minute of sex into you before you're out of breath. Like that's, you can't even use what you've been taking it for. So you might as well get in good, good physical condition. A hundred percent loop or absolute pleasure to have you on. Um, if people are watching and they want to reach out to you, what's the best place to get in, get in contact? Probably, probably I hate social media, but you got to do it right. So Instagram muscle nerds, underscore education. Uh, if people like memes, but do not message me about anything has to do with my career on loop. dot Lehman. If you like unpolitically correct, dirty, nasty memes and things, that's, that's it. So, um, and then yeah, info at muscle nerds.net. That's where you can, you find us. Brilliant. Luke, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'll let you get on with your day. I'll speak to you soon. All right. See you soon. Thank you for listening to the Alpha Gen X podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss next week's episode. For more resources on alphagenics and men's health, visit alphagenics.co.uk. Until next time.