Transformation Secrets with Luke Leaman from the Muscle Nerds

# Transformation Secrets with Luke Leaman from the Muscle Nerds

**Channel:** Charlie Johnson - CJ COACHING
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=t8NGAZUkX3M

So welcome to another episode of The Shredder Show. Today we've got an absolutely incredible guest and someone who I'm very, very excited to have a conversation with, who is Mr. Luke Lehman from The Muscle Nerds. So I first came across Luke via Ben Bukowski, who's a good friend's podcast, and he had some incredibly wise advice to give on that podcast. Very insightful, hugely knowledgeable, and provides some amazing nutrition courses via his business, Muscle Nerds. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Luke. Yeah. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks for having me. So to dive into things, what I found very fascinating was with you, with your approach to things, Luke, and your background experience, which we'll go into shortly, is that the way you look at the whole human system rather than where most people, when it comes to muscle building and fat loss, literally just look at the muscular system as it were. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? I mean, look, at the end of the day, everything has to work together. It has to work in a sequence. And, you know, we've kind of gotten away from this global system that we used to look at, especially in bodybuilding. If you look back at Frank Zane, Arnold, you look at, you know, Franco Plumbo, those guys had kind of the full package back then. They were really cognizant about their mental well-being, meditation, walking, doing their cardio, you know, chilling out and then training hard. Right. And I don't know what's happened over the last, you know, 50 years or whatever. it's just they've gotten away more and more away as bodybuilding's become more mainstream we've gotten more and more away from what bodybuilding actually started out as which is basically you know at that time in southern california they would have powerlifting meets weightlifting meets and things like that and then they just started taking their shirts off and uh kind of posing down and then it ended up turning the bodybuilding and as it got more and more mainstream got more away from its roots, people lost all sense of the early physical culture history and what actually led to that moment and started kind of compartmentalizing things. So, you know, a lot of the things have gotten to just winning no matter what, like, don't worry if you create as a coach, don't worry if you starve somebody and they start getting hormonal issues and their endocrinology gets screwed up and their hair falls out and they start getting some type of weird food thing and have to see a psychiatrist. That's the type of shit that happens, but nobody wants to talk about it really. And I think there's a better and smarter way of doing this by understanding what's happening when you make decisions on how you train, how you do your conditioning, how you eat, and then how you have your mindset. You have to have all that stuff globally in order to progress in a manner which allows you to do really well at it, but also allows you to recover after the show and be as healthy as competition can be. I think it's one of those things that people often only I know like Ben talks about a lot like the sort of dials or knobs variation when people have like brain intensity like dial ups for max supplements whatever but they don't look at anything else other like in terms of rest recovery mindset and like overall health. Yeah that's the thing you know and we get this all the time where people are, you know, I kind of before, before the last few years, I did a lot of work on just fixing people who had been screwed up by doing their own programming for a show or a number of coaches had done it to them. And you can't imagine how hard it is when you go, listen, you don't need to train 21 hours a week. You don't have to eat just 900 calories and zero carbs. Like you can't sustain this forever. This is why you haven't had a period in five years. This is why you feel terrible. This is why you're having to take pre-workout just to get up in the morning. This is why you're binging and purging and doing all this stuff. It doesn't have to be that way. But as they say in the meme, that's how it be. And it's crazy to me because you get these people that are messed up. They're going, listen, this is what we're going to do. Right now, you're training two hours a day, six days a week. and you're eating 1200 calories. What we're going to do is we're going to pump your calories up. You're going to train four days a week and you're going to get more sleep because you're only sleeping four or five hours a night. And they look at you and they go, nah, it's not going to work. Fuck that. I have to train or I blow up. Okay. You know, if you're not, don't hire somebody that has expertise in this and then not want to do what they say, they keep doing what they're doing. Eventually they come back and say, you know what, you're right. I can't do this anymore. And then And when we get them to actually do the stuff and be very consistent and patient, everything gets a lot better. And then contest prep gets much more smooth. Contest prep shouldn't be that difficult until the end. I know people that they're suffering for six to 12 months, which is completely unnecessary. There's going to be some suffering before you get on stage, but that should be in like the last three to six weeks where you really starting to feel it Okay here comes the time period where it going to really suck I only have like 40 more days left of feeling like shit and then i get to be kind of semi again as i pull myself out of it i'm saying you know it's bad i mean the state you're counting down the days and i've been there before but uh oh it's the worst you start getting comp brain yeah you get comp brain man i i remember one of my first shows i had no idea what i was doing right i mean i studied this stuff for a long time but I was young and you know I had this real big intrinsic motivator I just got out of a bad breakup and a few years relationship and I was like I'll show you I'm gonna get like shredded and get on stage you're gonna wish you had me back doesn't work they don't give a shit so I learned that that's one lesson I learned all that but yeah I did the the old-school thing man I tilapia and cod for every meal and I had and well I I didn't do asparagus because I didn't know about the whole, you know, diuretic effect of asparagus and the magical fat loss effects. Mine was green beans because I can smash green beans and never get bored. And steamed broccoli. And then when I felt flat, I threw some brown rice. Now, this was on top of walking two to three hours a day and training two hours. So basically one hour twice a day. I'd go to the gym twice. I don't know how the hell I got any work done. That's all I was doing. And I did well. You want to place, you know, top five out of something like 70 dudes. But, man, I remember in the last probably four to five weeks, I was functionally retarded. I had no fucking idea what was going on. I was, I lost my car. So I had to go drive to a client's house. I couldn't find my car. You know where I found it? I found it in my garage. I forgot I had a garage. I kept losing my keys. And I found them in the trash can. I'd find them in the freezer, you know, so I just, you know, that's what happens, you know, you're deep in the hole and you're wanting to place and do well, you're going to have to get in the hole like that and have a pump break. But that should be a very small, like, beginning and end of your job. That reminds me, to be fair, of a bad memory. I had the same thing where I'd just been doing loads of posing practice. And then in London, there's a place called Westfield Shopping Centre. It's like the biggest shopping mall in the UK. So the car park's massive. I genuinely couldn't find my car and i literally just want to sit on the floor and just cry like i was so tired and just had enough eventually i did find the car for about an hour but uh yeah sometimes i think is as a benefit sometimes when you push yourself to when you're completely fucked and you can't even function when you go back to normal life everything's so easy again yeah yeah man it's uh it's it's funny how it's bodybuilding has gotten so popular but people don't really understand what it takes so probably i find like one out of five people that come to us to get trained for one actually has what it takes to follow through and four people you just don't even waste your time because if they can't handle the training and the stress and the priority that the show has to be if they want to do well um i remember at one show i blew my back out i couldn't train my legs for probably seven weeks before the show so i kind of worked around it and i was in so much pain uh before i got on stage i was like oh man i'm gonna grab some painkillers take some painkillers on i thought what i thought was painkillers because i got it from my mom's medicine cabinet sorry mom if you listen to this but i didn't realize that she had taken a xanax and put it in a different bottle no wait it was not xanax it was ambium if you know what that is in america ambium when you take it if you don't go to sleep it makes you hallucinate and you have amnesia. So I take what I think is just a standard painkiller, no big deal. A couple of shots of wine, I'm getting ready to go on stage. Don't remember being on stage at all. I just remember walking on stage, walking off, getting called back to get in the final kind of lineup, the top five. And come to find out, yeah, I had Ambien, didn't remember anything, was hallucinating on stage. And apparently my posing, which is not good, was apparently amazing. because I had no idea what was going on. So, you know, it's funny that the shit that happens in the chaos when you're that depleted and you grab the wrong thing or take the wrong thing or, you know, text the wrong person. It's all kinds of crazy shit that happens. But your brain's just not working. But, you know, kind of going back to what you were saying, you know, when you look at, like, the complexity of the human system and if people just focus on one thing, they're just focusing on the muscular system, but the brain's controlling the muscular system. So we really need to make sure that the brain is in a calm state when it needs to be in a calm state and a heightened state when it needs to be in a heightened state. And we want to make sure the brain is fed. So you don't turn into that calm brain too early because that's what happens to people is you're not feeding the brain. The brain shuts things down. Your training goes to shit and then your body goes to shit and you don look good And do you see this out of interest happens more frequently with women than men or there no real gender discrepancy? I think, yeah, I would say it's more to do with women because it's, and I don't want to sound like misogynist. This is just man observation. Women tend to fall for more of the fad stuff and they tend to believe people more and they end up getting with some you know mr the 10 buck to 1976 says this is how we do it and blah blah and they don't stay current with science and they do crazy shit like not giving carbs for you know eight months or whatever and they end up looking horrible when they get on stage because they don't that there's things that a lot of the bodybuilders don't know as far as i'm talking i'm being very generalized in this i know bodybuilders who really know their shit they know the biochemistry. They know the cell biology. They know how this goes. I'm talking about the other 98%. They won't give you a carb for eight months, maybe even longer. And then they give you a shit ton of carbs in your peak week wanting you to fill out and they can't figure out why you should look like shit. You're sweating a lot, but you're just super stringy and you can't fill out. You don't know what to do. So you end up doing a shit load to just go try to get some maccas in you, some sodium some fat just trying to feel your body out somehow and then they end up going the other way and they look puffy they look like a fucking uh water balloon on stage and they go what the fuck well shit if you don't give someone carbs for that long and they're under that type of stress and you're in that much of an energy deficiency a lot of the enzymes you need to make glycogen you don't have because you don't have enough carbohydrates coming in to meet a high level of glycogen synthase so when you do eat the carbs and it goes in the cell the body goes well i don't want to do this. I'm just going to do something else with like make body heat or maybe I'm going to push it out of cells lactate. I'm going to turn it into something else, but it can't turn into glycogen. So if anybody's listening to this and they want to know, they're like, well, that sounds like my last contest prep. That's why you're not filling out. You haven't taken carbs in until the last few days. Your body doesn't really know what to do with it. So it does other things. So what people should be doing at that level is the, as you get leaner, you should be adding more carbs. You're getting more glucose and you're more insulin sensitive. Your body wants that. You should be adding more carbs and taking the fat down, not the other way around. Okay. That way, if you load the carbs over time, you build more transports for the carbs to get out of the stomach or out of the intestines into the bloodstream to get processed to get in the cell. And then you can actually package that up as glycogen and you look nice and full and you don't have to worry about spilling over. It's interesting you said that because that's the approach I took in my uh last dieting phase it wasn't for competition but for photo shoot where I actually dropped my protein a little bit because my protein was quite high and then ramped my carbohydrates up when I started to get hungry my performance started to suffer and it was like a magic bullet like body fat started dropping again performance increased felt amazing and literally just cruised into it from there no problem at all and I find it um amazing how I think a lot of it's the mainstream media this is paranoia that you eat a carbohydrate you're going to gain body fat and like realistically people need to take into context what carbohydrates are designed to do um just that's probably the biggest thing you see people come to you they want to go to massive extremes in terms of diets in terms of doing keto and all sorts of crazy shit like that yeah you know yeah everybody is an accumulation of their past experience so you know if we look at just like gen pop people if we take like bodybuilders out and we get gen pop you get people who they come in and i say okay have you lost weight before yes how much weight have you lost 25 kilos okay have you put that back on yes how much you put back on 28 kilos okay how many times has this happened five times okay sweet what got you to lose the weight ketogenic diet okay they go that's the only thing that works for me ketogenic diet always works for me cool. So the ketogenic diet, full 25 kilos, and he put three extra back on when you gain weight. How can you explain to me in the seven, five times, how's keto working for you now? And then they look at you like in blink a couple of times and they go, shit, I didn't think about it that way. Like, yeah, cool. We can do a keto. That's fine. But the way you set your keto up is probably not realistic to what keto actually is because keto has become all kinds of ridiculous shit because anytime commercialism and marketing gets a hold of the concept. Here's a keto food. Here's a paleo coconut cookie. They want to fuck the whole system up. And then they make a diet that was really good, can be really nice for people, and they bastardize it. And then you get all the people on the evidence-based side, they go, ah, keto sucks, paleo sucks, life sucks, everything sucks. And it's because they having a reaction to the marketing They not being proactive about looking at the diet and use utilizing it as a tool at a certain time for a certain person And so people are, they're confused. They don't know what the fuck to do. And again, I think it's where marketing and mainstream media just spins people in circles and they don't know where to turn almost. Yeah. A buddy of mine posted something today on Facebook and then I re-shared it on Instagram. And it's basically like, you know, you hear, you hear people say, well you know eggs are good for you eggs are bad for you all these scientists can't figure out what the fuck is good and bad no it's not the scientists that are doing that it's the it's the media and the way they interpret and then report what the scientists say that's what you're really mad at not scientists right so you know you've got all of these various tools that are great um it's but in the dieting thing you could do a standard ketogenic diet whatever if you're training i've got one I call the athletic ketogenic diet, which is higher protein, lower in fat. You can do a cyclical keto, targeted keto. You could do a modified low-carb diet. You could do an isocaloric diet. You could do a zone-based diet. You could do a 50% carb, 60% carb. There's a million different ways to write this shit. And they're all good if you know when to use that tool for the right person. That's exactly what I was going to say. It all depends on the specificity of the individual and what's actually going to work for them, probably most likely psychologically, I'd say. Yeah. And everything's contextual. And things like stress and your brain's perception of stress will alter the way you handle your macronutrients. It'll alter the energy flux through different pathways. so if we consider we just look at three macros you know protein carb fat we won't worry about ketones we won't worry about ethanol we won't worry about any of this shit we're just talking about the three ones that everybody talks about and everybody tracks because nobody tracks the booze that's crazy um even though they should so when you look at you got your two main areas of energy is going to be fat and carbohydrate and now you can you can leverage protein too you can utilize, like you said, lots of protein, a high level of protein to leverage a small amount of thermic effect of food. You can change some of that protein into carbohydrate. You can use that to funnel some energy through the Krebs cycle. There's a lot of things you can do with protein that can manipulate some of these things. It can be sneaky little, what I call caloric funnels here and there. Now, if you look at fat and carbs, what's the difference? A lot of energy in fat, a lot less in carbs, but fat's slow. There's a lot more steps of getting fat where it needs to be. and also broken down to utilize, carbs are much faster. So here's the thing. Right now, low-carb diets are very popular, and they have been probably for the last 20 years, whether that's South Beach diet, Atkins, whether that's carb backloading, cyclical, whatever. The more stressed out someone gets, the more likely they're going to skew their metabolism to want to utilize carbohydrates. So if that's the case and they're stressed all the time and their brain is in a state of fear instead of a state of safety, then their body's going to want to utilize carbohydrates because they can make really fast energy from that. So when that happens, they become metabolically inflexible, meaning that they're not burning enough fat at rest. They're burning a higher percentage of carbohydrates. Now that can pose a problem when your goal is fat loss, because if I'm burning, if someone with good metabolic flexibility is burning 70% fat at rest and 30% carbs, and you skew that and that drops down to say 50% fat and 50% carbs, that's going to pose a real big problem for you because you're going to get, you're going to struggle to lose body fat as fast as you think you should. And you're going to get demotivated. That's going to lead to binging, which is going to make the weight go up. So there's a lot of things that go on. And so in a lot of cases, if people are stressed out like everyone is now it makes sense to think about possibly lowering your carbs a little bit since that tends to be the macro that rules all the other ones especially under under a state of stress 100% when it comes to stress um there's a huge amount in terms of fat storage and like negative effects of muscle building i think there's no coincidence that the best bodybuilders in the world tend to be super relaxed and pretty chilled out doing things yeah yeah i mean shit like crazy personalities in that respect to super driven and stressed all the time. And that almost is anecdotal evidence of that theory. Yeah, I mean, they understand that you stimulate growth in the gym by basically harming yourself. And then you have to go home and you have to rest. If you don't rest, you're not gonna grow as fast as you need to. And they try to stay chilled out, you know, most of the time. You see that though with a lot of very driven athletes. You always see this, you know,

very calm. If you've ever been to a powerlifting meet, you'll know what I'm talking about, right? So I grew up powerlifting, bodybuilding, and strongman and track and all that. And, you know, you go to a powerlifting meet, you know, they've got like this ragey, like screaming Satan music and everybody's bald with guts and purple goatees and that type of thing. And they're all eating Pringles and ding-dongs and shit. And, but what you notice is when a guy's ready to go on the platform, like he's just stone cold nothing. And you'll see guys or girls walk up to the platform and they'll get in front of the bar to deadlift and then all of a sudden this weird, somebody's flipped the light switch and they just go fucking mental. Like you'll see guys just go crazy and they grab the bar and go. And then they put the bar down and then somebody flipped the switch again and they're just calming down, right? And you'll see that with all high level athletes, especially if they're good athletes where they know when to turn it on and when to turn it off, and they don't like to burn off excessive amounts of energy or effort. And that's the same thing with bodybuilders. You see bodybuilders going to do crazy, insane, ridiculous shit in the gym with drop sets and chain the bands and screaming at each other, slapping each other in the face, and then when they leave the gym, they're just sipping on their shake like nothing happened. But that's what it takes. Obviously, they're flipping their nervous system on and off. would you suggest people like limit say for example caffeine and stimulant um intake like away from workouts as an example so that's something i've been trialing is having uh i was a bit bit of a caffeine junkies like massively knocking that on the head and only having caffeine pre-workout and i've found that's made a big difference for me in terms of a reducing stress and anxiety and then also when it's time to flip on and off it's much easier to control that almost yeah you know i mean that's a that's a big topic because everybody responds to caffeine differently so you have um people that are hyper responders and people who are not very fast responders or you have people that metabolize fast and don't like i'm a fast metabolizer most substances that you would ever take um whether that's caffeine or fun stuff you do in holland or whatever um not not that i would know about that stuff you know um but my wife she's the opposite so if she drinks a Red Bull at six in the morning, she can't sleep at 2 a.m. the next day, right? So I can get up and drink coffee one after another, after another. In fact, like my students will tell you this. They think it's funny because they bring me six shot coffees when I lecture. And I think one day in London, I drank 36 shots of coffee between like 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. And I was totally fine. But that's the difference, right? So there are great health benefits to coffee if you keep it within reason. But coffee also can be very irritating to some people's guts. So if you have gut issues, it might be a good idea not to do that. If you have Crohn's, a lot of people with IBDs by IBS as they're drinking coffee, coffee can be cross-reactive with autoimmune diseases like Crohn's. So if your doctor said, hey, you can't have gluten because you've got this autoimmune disease, well, you shouldn't really have coffee because that can sometimes in certain people cross-react. Same thing with chocolate. A lot of things that can become cross-reactive. If you're just stressed out and you're a habitual coffee drinker, it's probably not that big of a deal. now if you're railing off a line of crystal and having a coffee you probably want to cut the crystal down a little bit you know so you got to look at like how hard are some of these substances coffee really not that bad and if you're drinking six shots before you get out of bed in the morning you probably want to cut that down to a couple shots of espresso but again the only way you know is if you cut it out you cut it out and you feel better that's a positive sign that you probably need to limit your exposure to that. That goes with anything. Different foods, coffee, different illicit substances, whatever. Exercise. I think that's the magic key. I think too many people don't test things and are not patient enough with it. I tried probably a few months ago a whole week with no caffeine, no stimulants at all. I actually felt worse for it. You felt worse? Yeah. It's pointless. I think part of the problem with people If we look at what we're actually trying to work on here, we're talking about autonomic nervous system. You've got the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system. People tend to think these things are on a seesaw, but they're not. They're in two separate elevators. One's going up while the other's going down, and then one's going up and one's going up. What people tend to do is if your parasympathetic system is here and your sympathetic system is here what they do is they just use a reductionist model and pull things out Well I reduce training volume Okay I reduce stimulants Okay I might do an elimination diet because certain foods are bloating me giving me gas and I don feel good Cool. So they'll pull things out to lower the sympathetic system. But for some reason, they won't work on the parasympathetic side. It's like, okay, cool. Why don't you get a hobby? Why don't you like to draw? draw for 30 minutes before you go to bed I don't have time for that, go get a massage I don't have time for that, do some stretching I don't have time for that, okay so you will meal prep and you will go in and train like thrash yourself 12 hours a week in the gym with your buddy slapping you and kicking you in the nuts and telling you to squat you'll do all that but if I remove that down 4 or 5 days of lifting you won't utilize the other days to go get a massage go to a sauna, go for a walk in the journal, they won't do it And that's the thing. If you don't actively work on the parasympathetic side, it doesn't have any reason to adapt and get better. You have to remove things and then you have to add things back to kind of work on, you know, if we want to talk about like traditional Chinese medicine to get all woo about it. If you've got too much yang, you've got to pull the yang out and you've got to add some yin stuff in. So if you look at that concept of yin and yang, yang is the fire and yin is the oil. So if your fire's burning here and your oil's here, if you shut off the fire, you still have to replace the oil. And when it's massively unbalanced for years and years and people are really starting to crash, they have to work on getting the oil back in so they can turn the fire back on at some point. that's an awesome explanation to be fair I've never thought about it in that context and that elevator explanation six or that's a very very good note there to take so yeah cool I've um I think it goes you said too many people think about taking away rather than improving and one of the things I've noticed for me personally the last month it's probably the most consistent I've ever been with training nutrition and everything because UK's in lockdown I have absolutely nothing else to do other than work eat train sleep repeat like day on end and I really be focusing on nailing I get deep tissue work every three days I sleep as much as I want I get up when I naturally want to stress is very low and like it's the perfect environment and it's amazing how much better your body responds and feels and when you start to like help it work for itself almost yeah yeah and i you know the when the when the lockdowns happen you everyone had a choice you can either take this time where you can't go to work and you're working in your underwear and nobody can tell when you're doing this you can take this time to try to make a make a bad situation or a good situation or you can just roll over and take it right um and you see that like some people get the covid 15 or whatever like they just went to college you got freshman 15 fuck off you're an adult now you shouldn't be doing that um you know the perfect time when you actually can't leave your house you don't have any excuse not to do push-ups sit-ups pistols stretch sleep more make your own food like what else do you have to do you know there's nothing else read a book self-improvement makes me laugh though it's like 99 in the world want to lose weight and they say that COVID is making fat, but COVID is not making you put crap food in your mouth and no one's stopping you from walking. So you can control your calories going out. So then why can you not lose weight? It's unreal. I had people say, well, I don't have a treadmill or an elliptical at home. That's cool. Do air squats until you can't breathe and then rest until your heart rate gets down to 120 and do it again. Order on Amazon because Amazon will still bring you shit. order yourself an aerobic step and just step up and down that step until you get your heart rate to like 140 150 beats per minute watch a movie and do that for 45 minutes you're like oh man that doesn't that doesn't sound like it's fun it doesn't doesn't have to be fun training doesn't always have to be fun it needs to be fun a lot but if you have a goal sometimes things you have to do shit you don't want to do when i train i do all kinds of shit i don't want to do because if i don't do them i'll blow my back out or i have neck pain or whatever so you know um people just people We're always full of excuses. They're devoid of grit. They're devoid of personal responsibility. They're devoid of ownership. They're devoid of personal pride. And they are full of fucking excuses. And trust me, I've heard them all. We train almost exclusively other personal trainers. You want to talk about the most fucked up people you've ever trained? Gen pop is way easier than personal trainers. Personal trainers, because they've already heard all the excuses, they have a book of excuses so every time you knock down an excuse they'll turn the page and go well hold on a second hold on I got one here and I'll give you another fucking excuse and I'm like dude I've been doing this for over two decades you not going to give me an excuse I haven fucking heard maybe the aliens took you and put an anal probe last night and you can drink because your ass hurts I don know I never heard that one but I still be in the industry another few decades so maybe I will. The thing is, I think a lot of it's almost to do with, I'm not sure I like the term, but the snowflake generation. It's something that's driving me insane at the moment. Anyone out there knows how to fix this. My iPhone keeps turning down my music, saying I'm playing my music too loud. It's trying to protect my hearing. I'm like, I want to destroy my hearing and get amped up in the gym. That's my own conscious decision. I'm an adult. Apple, you have no rights to do this. It's just ridiculous. I don't need anybody to protect me. I don't need the government to fucking protect me. I don't need my PC to protect me. I can do it myself. I was talking about that to somebody today, actually, how soft people are going. Especially, look, I'm from Texas, and Americans are getting soft as fuck, and it's just crazy. No one has any sense of self-sustainability and just doing your own shit and knuckling down and getting it done. None of that. They want the government to take care of them. They want to cry. Yeah, fuck off. Stop crying. Pull your fucking big boy pants on and get to work. Get your shit done. But you've seen that over the last probably 12 to 14 years where the tech giants are now, they've been working on this for a long time. They want people to get dependent on technology and get to the point where they can't always order Uber Eats because nobody can cook anymore. They have to order from Amazon because they don't want to go to the store anymore. It's like, you know, I don't want to get conspiracy theorists type thing, but it's easy to see how all this convenience stuff is now fucking people's, it's fucking their desire to even want to do things and take care of things and take care of themselves. They're just completely throwing it out the window. In a very creepy, weird way. It's a bit like the film The Matrix, like people trying to live their life through their phones and gaming all this sort of shit now and now you've got all the shaming it's like you got the fat shaming you've got the gender shaming you've got this but no one says well what about the health shaming you're shaming me because i want to be healthy we've been shamed all the time here eat this cake eat this cake you don't have to eat like that all the time no i like to eat like this i like to work it i'll just come drink and do well we've been health shamed and fitness shame since since i've been in the industry since I was 19. I'll be 43 this month. Nobody ever cares about that. You can't even use the word fat on Facebook. I posted, I made a Wagyu brisket and said, look at all the fat. And I got a notice from Facebook telling me that it looks like you might be bullying somebody. I go, what? What the fuck are you talking about? It's insane. Insane. Yes, that's the crazy way things are going. And to come back to rather than conspiracies, which I know we can easily go down that tangent. it we all get started probably about four hours conversation when it comes to further things optimize the uh system and obviously digestive systems are very big um part of everything we do and what are the some of the big troubleshooting things people listening should really watch out for uh number one don't don't assume you have a gut issue just because you have some gut things going on. And that's one of the big ones. I get people all the time. They, they do a consult with me or they come to train and they think I'm going to give them some crazy gut protocol with all these supplements and shit. Um, you, you can't even go that route until you basically tick off all the boxes for other things. Now, going back to the conversation earlier about the brain, brain controls, everything, like everything, your body is stupid. Your brain is smart. Your body only does what the brain tells it to do. So if the brain thinks there's an issue, then it creates some type of symptom profile. So you think about it like this. The majority of people I see have gut issues also have overly chronic stressful lives and they won't calm down. OCD, type A, they work too much. They sleep too little. They comfort eat a lot of hedonistic eating. um you know they don't don't move enough like we'll take exercise out the window a lot of those people still exercise but they think that that's all they need to do they thrash themselves they probably do more than they need to do more intensity and more volume they need to do on less calories need to do so when you you get into the sympathetic state there's a there's an electrical component to this or a neural component and then there's a chemical component so your brain will send information down the sympathetic fibers into the gut, where the gut will produce CRH. The same thing that's in your brain that tells your pituitary to tell the adrenal glands to push out catecholamines. And so in the peripheral, the CRH tends to make people guts more permeable I be hesitant to say leaky gut because another marketing term people lose their minds If you say leaky gut they lose their minds If you go intestinal permeability, like, okay, that's fine. It's the semantics, it's the same thing. But that CRH will make the guts more leaky, so to speak. You'll also have typically an increase in histamine release from mast cells, which also makes the gut leaky. When that happens, you start getting things in the circulation that aren't supposed to be there. So if you don't chew your food like an adult, like most people chew, chew, swallow, they don't chew until it's a semi-liquid state. If you don't have good amounts of gastric juices and digestive enzymes and bile, because maybe you're stressed and that's having an effect on your ability to produce those things, you're going to start getting things in the circulation that the immune system doesn't recognize. It's okay. You're in the wrong neighborhood, buddy. We're going to take care of you. So we'll start attacking food. you get a food intolerance and that's what a lot of people have they get the bullet bloating and the gas and the belching and the burning and the study get all this stuff um when they eat certain foods when they didn't before it just kind of came on um and then you've got the chemical component where you're secreting cortisol and cortisol is causing things to be leaky and then the immune system starts attacking things and you have rampant systemic inflammation um and then so then the body starts producing cortisol to kind of bitch slap the immune system, get it to calm down because it's out of control. So you have this issue where it's like you get leaky gut, you got antigens expressing in the body, the immune system is going crazy, cortisol comes and slaps him around. So now the immune system can't fight anything. Now, bacteria and viruses start to get like invade you, immune system can't take care of it fast enough. So you get to this place where you're all like, not really that sick, you're just kind of a little sick. And you know, you got the sniffles for months and you're just kind of run down and you're just like, man, I just wish I just get sick for three days and get this over with. And then until they get this stuff rectified, they're never going to get gut issues. But rectification doesn't mean going and buying a whole foods box, you know, detox protocol or gut protocol. The thing is you have to work on the brain first. If you don't get control of this and get it calmed down, that's what's the common denominator between all this. You got to get the brain calmed down, let the gut start to heal, maybe do a food elimination diet and then you might throw in some glutamine some you know antimicrobials some biofilm destabilizers you know you can start throwing that stuff in later but it's never going to work if you don't pull off the stimulus which is always going to be the brain so that's something i always try and um get across the clients a lot of times they try and put plaster over things rather than trying to get to the root of the problem and if you can cut something off at the root then you don't need the plaster in this that makes sense like i think yeah same thing i see where i've seen um very poor physiotherapists for example say you have an elbow issue like an elbow and knee generally could be a consequence so you generally if you have an issue with your elbow your knees probably going to come from your hip or your shoulder so they'll treat your elbow your knee but they won't lift your hip or your shoulder so they're just treating the problem rather than the cause which i think is probably one of the biggest mistakes i see with the health and fitness industry generally anyway that's it just putting band-aids over bullet holes and not not addressing the real problem and i have that discussion with clients all the time because i do a lot of manual therapy stuff massage therapy manual therapy fast stretch therapy plus exercise therapy and people will come to me after they've seen four five six videos and a chiropractor and they'll say oh they they can't fix it they don't know what's wrong and i go okay what hurts this hurts okay let me ask me something where did they work on you well there of course they go okay there isn't the problem it's probably going to be in your shoulders probably gonna be your t-spine in your scapula and then we have to look that and then we have to look at your hip and we have to look down at your knee and your foot you know little little snap crackle pop you know moving some stuff around mobilization little traction little fast stress therapy a couple exercises and then they go oh shit i've got no pain. I'm like, cool. You should have come see me first because they're lazy. They don't want to go through the process of figuring this stuff out and investigating and also doing continuing education. They don't do any continuing education. And when they do, it's in their little echo chamber of other people that believe the same thing they do at the same school. And so they just keep, it's like a big circle jerk and they're all patting themselves on the back, telling each other good job but they're not really doing that great of work or they wouldn't have a personal trainer fixing the fucking patients it's uh often one of the things i get frustrated in the uk for example is the quality of standard that people are trained at in terms of physiotherapy and also personal trainers is pretty poor in my opinion and i think it's improving there's something's on the way and going down a slightly different tangent and one of the other big things I think people massively neglect is blood pressure. And it's something I do a lot of work on myself.

keep uh down personally i think it's a lot of people general population overlook and i know like obviously you heard on your podcast previously with ben you talked about how uh shocked you were with a lot of people i think when you came to london i think it was people's blood pressure crazy maybe it's british i'll tell you before we get on that i just want to say one small thing like um you know you say oh the level of these people in the uk are really poor. It's like that everywhere. It's like that everywhere. The schools are getting soft. They're taught not to put their hands on people. There's a lot of stuff. And it doesn't matter what country you get into. I'll tell you right now, the country that's in the worst shape is America. They will not spend money on their education. If they do, they'll spend it on TRX or BOSU ball certifications. They won't do it on actually learning how to fix people. It's insane to me. But I find in the UK and I find Australia, those are our two biggest markets. And there's no surprise that those two markets, all the trainers make three to four times more per hour than the trainers in America because they invest in themselves. They buy education. If you do education and you do a lot of self-study, you can think of it like investing in the stock market. You look at the magic of compound interest. the more I study the more I learn the easier it gets to actively recall this and learn other things it's easier to fix people and then I'm just gonna I'm not making a lot of money yet and then boom then the compound interest hits and now you're and now you've kind of broken out of the rat race of all the other trainers but you know I do know a great he doesn't live in the UK anymore but Danny Christie from pain posture performance a friend of mine he lives in Florida now um he he did something i don't know what the qualification is it's a university qualification like massage plus kind of athletic trainer like coach strength coach that thing the dude's phenomenal with his knowledge so sometimes that when i meet people like that it makes me forget that the rest of the country doesn't have that mindset like you've got these guys that are outliers uh that really go and seek knowledge and have a beginner's mind um now on blood pressure so here's the thing we see this all the time with the with the the bodybuilders especially on the performance enhancement side when they're taking gear they seem to think that just because they take gear they're supposed to have you know stage 100 hypertension that's not the case if you if you're taking gear and your blood pressure is crazy high you realistically need to take care of that. Like that needs to go down. You're got, you have a lot of vascular pressure. You're taking a lot of things that are thickening your blood, increasing hematocrit, possibly increasing fibrogenin, um, dunboxane, all these things that could cause blood clots. And then you have all this pressure every time you lift, um, against the vascular, uh, walls. And when that happens, you have pressure against the walls and they're rigid. You're creating a lot of inflammation and a lot of micro tears and damage in that. So your cholesterol naturally is going to go up. Your LDL is going to go up. It's going to deposit proteins in those fissures to try to create an internal band-aid while you start to repair that stuff. But because the blood pressure is so high all the time, you can't really repair that. So they end up narrowing the vascular system and then they end up with a heart attack or they end up with a stroke or DVT or whatever, aneurysms, things like that. So if you are taking gear, you definitely need to look at your blood pressure, look at your resting heart rate, get your labs done. And if those things are off, you need to take action. And in a lot of cases, it's lower the dose a little bit. You're taking way too much and using it as a crutch and then take care of your cardiovascular respiratory system. Easiest way to bring blood pressure down from an exercise standpoint, do some fucking cardio. You don't have to become a marathon runner, but get on an inclined treadmill and walk hard for 130, 150 beats per minute and do that for an hour a day. Get your blood pressure where it needs to be. Get your resting heart rate where it needs to be. It's actually going to make you recover better. It's going to make you able to train harder with less rest in the gym, and you're going to have more energy to train. That's some great advice. A friend of mine who's a professional bodybuilder, I've seen him and his heart rate, blood pressure is like 145, 150 and he's not concerned about it at all. He's like, that's fine, that's normal for me. It might be normal for you, but it's still way too high. No, even here, there were some coaches here that they train a lot of guys in here and they were like strength athletes 150 over 90 150 over 100 that totally normal for a strength athlete It not normal That's fucked up. And then there was one very popular physique coach here. He had a fucking stroke. He had a stroke, and he's all about the fuck cardio. I think he's even got a license plate for it. He had a fucking stroke. It almost killed him. the only reason it didn't kill him is thank god the weights and he was strong enough where it would have killed a normal person but he's he's a beast he's not a normal person but you know then you know you think that after you have a scary thing happen like that that you'd be like okay maybe i should listen to dr maybe some cardio um he's back to the whole cardio thing and the argument with some of these guys is that well you don't need to do cardio to win a physique show, it's just kind of a waste of energy. And like, you're right, you don't need it to win a show, but it can be massively helpful if you understand what you're doing with the cardio and not using it to chase calories, but using it for adaptation, which is what I do. So we will front load people's programs with cardio. And that could be, you know, cardiovascular respiratory training from aerobic work or like submaximal or supermax. That could be whatever that's going to be, depending on their metrics and what we're trying to get out of it. And we get that out of the way first. And so we get their blood pressure down in under 120 over 80. We try to get the resting heart rate in the 50s, try to get their VO2 max up in the 50s, get their lactate threshold up. We take care of all that stuff because if we can get that hard journey done, we don't have to really mess with it too much anymore. And we can take most of the cardio out while they transfer into a specific phase for growth. So if we go into a hypertrophy phase, I don't want to be doing a lot of cardio unless if they enjoy it, fine. But, you know, that's at that point, that is wasted effort or if they want to eat more and we might do it. But most of the time, we just want to get the metrics right, get them in really good shape, then move into a five or six day a week hypertrophy protocol, bring them up to a little over maintenance. and then if we see the metrics get screwed up we move into a diet break and add some cardio back in for a few weeks everything normalizes and then we go right back into the hypertrophy and that's kind of how we period as a period as what we do we think of things as like alternating periodization from a point of i'm gonna beast the shit out of you after you're healthy and the minute i see your metrics get wonky for five six days and you're feeling like shit we're gonna we're gonna switch to an accumulation phase of metabolic work, cardio, least mode stuff, take you back to maintenance, get you stabilized over two or three weeks, and then we're going to jump right back into the next intensification phase, which would be your bodybuilding work. On a slightly different tangent, you mentioned obviously cardio and hypertrophy phase. How do you practically tend to structure that with your clientele out of interest? Obviously, it's very case-dependent. With the hypertrophy phase? Yeah. Yeah, like I said, it could be client-dependent. So if we're talking physique, I'm still, and I know I'm going to get shit for this and flag, but I still see a lot of associations between different somatotypes and how that's displaying the phenotype. So if I have someone like myself who's more mesomorphic and maybe leaning more towards the endomorphic side than the ectomorphic side, so I've got really wide shoulders wide clavicles very narrow hips for my clavicle structure so I've got I've got kind of this that kind of upside down triangle on top of a tiny little triangle kind of typical mesomorph build if I think about gaining weight and I think about weights I get bigger and stronger if I think about dieting I'm getting lean that's it right for me it's very simple I just for whatever reason, I've won and got the right parents. But I also have a fairly big bone structure for what would be considered mesomorphic. So it's more of an endomorphic kind of strength thing. So for me, in my experience, heavyweights works really well for me in a bodybuilding phase. Now, so I will spend the majority of my time in functional hypertrophy and maximum strength. and then I will not spend as much time in things like giant set strength, endurance, and hypertrophy. I find if I do that, I grow. If I do too much with the higher reps, I shrink. Now, if I had someone that came and they were built like an eye and had very small joints and really long limbs, I'm not going to have them lift very heavy. They don't have the joint mechanics and the structure to lift super heavy. So that's the type of person I'm going to be using a lot of drop sets, intensifiers giant sets tri sets We going to use a lot of higher rep type stuff to elicit that adaptation And then we might also use hypertrophy but we probably not going to get into maximal strength which they're not suited for realistically. So everything for me is, I'm looking at everything in my client. How do they like the train? Is that really going to be prudent to what we need to do? Have they ever gotten injuries training a certain way? And what's your body type? what's the mechanics around all of your different joints, short torso, long femur, long torso, short femur. We're looking at all that type of stuff so that we make sure we're picking the right exercise for the body type so we get the most out of it, but also so we don't create an injury because the minute you get injured, that sets you back on your contest route. One of the interesting things, what's your opinion in regards to genetic testing? In what? In regards to genetic testing. So say, for example, that you can have your, like I had mine done out of curiosity for testing. So they'll give you, so I had mine done by 23andMe, and I think then I provided the data to come with your DNA set, who then basically give you recommendations of what they think your genetic profiles opt more for. Yeah, I'll tell you, I don't know a whole lot about it. The only thing that, like kind of my understanding, this is a very uneducated opinion of this is that they're all full of shit. We don't know shit about genetics. We know some, but we don't know a whole lot, you know? And I can tell you, even with things like cancers, you know, my mom, when I was in my early twenties, got breast cancer and we asked the oncologist like, well, why is this still such a big deal? And he goes, look, as much as we know about the human body, we really only know about 4% about how the human body works. So if you're looking at that on like the whole thing and you say, well, we know all about genetics and DNA and all that, no, they don't really know yet. Right. So I think some things we can predict, you know, you have a predisposition for certain things. So if you have polymorphisms in, say, MTHFR pathways, you're going to have a hard time with the methionine-homocysteine cycle, methylated B12, methylated folic acid of the folate. That's going to affect the CBS cycle. There's a lot of other things that are coming in and out of these different pathways. There's a lot of cofactors you need for it. When you have a polymorphism, typically it's showing that you either have a dampened effect and something doesn't run as fast as it's supposed to, or you might have an overstimulated effect. You might be an over-methylator or you might be an under-methylator. So if you're somebody who massively under-methylates, and part of that's like the MTHFR, what people call the motherfucker gene, you're not going to be able to put folate where it needs to go at a fast rate. So you probably need to supplement with that instead of folic acid. If you have any methylation issues like that, you're probably going to need to take reduced B6 instead of pyridoxine, taking P5P instead of taking cobalavin for B12. Maybe you're taking methylcobalavin, adenosylcobalavin, hydroxycobalavin, whatever you think you need for where you need to put it. And then understanding that stress, chronic stress, fucks methylation like nobody's business. So if you want to screw your neurotransmitters up, if you want to screw your ability to basically drive estrogen down the right pathway, stress hormones and toxins and all that, if your brain is in a state of fear, don't worry about your little detox boxes. You're already fucked. You can take all the NAC and sulforaphane and take all the glutathione you want to do. Until you get your brain right, you're not putting any of that shit where it needs to go. So forget about it. sorry i get on these rants especially this late at night it's actually your passion on that sort of topic when you get to people coming to you that sort of situation how would you look to practically get someone to get their brain right so if there's anyone listening who's like listening to us like oh that's me i've got that issue what would you suggest so for me one of the big things would be like sounds a bit weird again but i've started speaking with like a psychologist and a therapist to help me optimize the way i think and feel and like the way i look at the world and as soon as you start to actually spend time reflecting and looking at the way you interact with other people it's then that in itself I think solves a lot of the problems do you have any recommendations yeah man I mean you hit the nail on the head most people are fucked up so but they don't want to look at that it's like we'll tell all of our clients like look you know I'm hearing some reflex here you know you really talk a lot of shit about your husband or your wife or your kids or your job or whatever you don seem very happy maybe you should go see somebody about that because i not qualified i listen but i not qualified to tell you how to work through this shit like i just trying to get you look good naked and maybe get you squad up um but you know maybe we get somebody here i don't know maybe somebody said something to you they shouldn't have when you were two years old and now it's fucked you up when i think you're 40 but the problem is when you say that people go i'm not crazy i don't need to go to a fucking psychiatrist That's not what I said. I said you might have some unresolved childhood trauma, adult trauma that you haven't processed because we all got that shit. We all crazy. We all first world crazy. So, you know, I've gone through my own stuff and trauma. And people think that you don't have to be depression doesn't have to be you're at the store buying a rope to string up. Like if you look at what they classify depression as, it would basically be classified as, I'm a little sad, you know, I'm just not that happy, you know? So a lot of people would benefit from seeing a counselor and kind of working through that stuff and getting some better strategies to cope. And you see a lot more progress. I don't know, do you know who, you know, Juggie Siddur? Yeah, I've heard of him. okay so juggy lovely guy he's done all our programs foundations our mentorship program all this yeah he's in the uk he's got indian body coach and one of the things that that we teach um and we actually had a course on it i don't know when we'll be able to do it again but it's called when it's not about the food it's like okay when the training's right the food's right but they're still not getting results so they can't be compliant the training and the food isn't going to sort that shit out. They probably need to see somebody. So we go through the mechanisms. I do the science and shit of like how the brain and stress and trauma affects the mitochondria and how that screws up the way your bioenergetics runs. And then we have the trauma counseling. It kind of shows what happens in the brain when there's trauma and why it's so hard to get rid of and what you can do about it as a coach. And it was massively popular when we did it. So, Juggie flew over here and went to the course in Melbourne when we had it. And immediately when he went back, first thing he did, he found the right trauma counselor, did the type of therapy that we recommend. And now all of his clients, when they come in, it's already paid for. They get a session with the counselor so they can see if there's anything that the counselor needs to work out with them. I think that's brilliant. I think all trainers should do something like that. Because that's kind of the missing link. is that mental health piece. If your client can't be compliant, it's not that they're stupid. It's not that they're lazy. It's that they're probably in a bit of pain that they don't want to recognize and that's leading them into hedonistic behavior instead of eudonistic behavior. So they're chasing, they're basically chasing pleasure as a way to self-medicate so they don't have to think about how much it hurts inside. And sometimes that's conscious. Often it's subconscious. You're doing things that you know you're not supposed to be doing because of something that you're not consciously aware of has been like stuck in your brain fucking you up it's that constant self-sabotaging yeah i mean for me uh i had an issue where when i i didn't want to go to college like after high school i wanted to go i was thinking about going to the military and my parents are like my parents are like super like late 60s hippies like you're not going to the military man peace love you know that it was like all right fine i i didn't want to go to college i didn't feel like i was mature enough to go to college i said okay i'll just work for a couple years maybe take some classes at junior college and then eventually go not you're going to college i went to college a fucking disaster i went to the number one party school in texas um which was Playboy magazines analysis. You can just assume how that went. Which place was it? It's no longer, it's now called Texas State University, but it was Southwest Texas when I went. So it's just south of Austin. So it was fucking toga parties and fucking going to Austin and doing blowing X and crazy shit. This is like the late 90s. It was just mayhem. But for me, when I finally said, okay, I'm not going to go to college anymore because I can't handle this. I can't do this. I'm just failing classes and partying and I just can't do this. I always wanted to be a personal trainer. This was at a time where it wasn't cool to be a trainer. If you told somebody, what do you do? I'm a personal trainer. They'd be like, this is a loser. It wasn't like it is now. It's almost kind of cool to be a trainer now. I asked my parents. I borrowed $600 for them to get my first certification. And my mom said, okay, that's fine. While you're trying to figure out what you wanna do with life, you go to your personal trainer thing, but this will only be a hobby.

never be a career. And then that made me want to make this work. And now my wife and I have multiple businesses internationally in Australia. And, you know, I've been able to, I've been fortunate enough to be the mentor for thousands of people and work for Charles Poliquin at one point in my career and all that. And, uh, but as good as that was to make me want to say, fuck you, mom, I'm going to do this anyways. And I just did it to spite her. It also fucked me up in ways I didn't know because every time I would see success, whether I was getting ready for a contest, whether I was in a relationship, whether I had good business stuff happen, a few weeks into it, I just heard this voice. This is only a hobby. You're not good enough. You can't take care of shit. You're a loser. And then I would just fucking whew, wine, fucking food, burgers, wine. And it's so bad. Now it doesn't happen to me anymore because I've done the trauma counseling. I've done this stuff and I've done some work on myself. But it was so bad that one of my buddies, I went to get a massage and he goes, I've never seen someone who can change their body composition as fast as you. I swear to God, you can go from fat to lean in like two days. I'm like, yeah, that's not a good thing. It's because I just fucking binged for two weeks. And then I fucking went the other way for two weeks. But that's the stuff that fucks people up, man. And it's stuff that people aren't actually focusing on. I think that's some very solid advice. I think the fact that we've both done that, I think it's testament to anyone who's listening that if any of that resonates with you, then reach out to ask for someone to help. If you want to message me, there's someone I can recommend who's been helping me. So I think that's a strong point to finish up on. So I want to say thank you so much for your time today, Luke. Where's the best place for people to go and find out some more about you and when we actually can travel, when you do hold courses again, you have more questions down here. we can run through a few more if you've got some more time let's run through a few more don't just kick me you don't need to stop I've got nothing else better to do my next question for you was in terms of must go health supplements what would you recommend in that side of things where are we at which must health supplements okay multivitamin get a good quality multivitamin it's good insurance understand that everything you're doing in the gym your food the rest you need cofactors for this to happen. Especially when you're dieting, you're pulling food out, you want to be on a calorie deficit, not a nutrient deficit. Those are two completely different things. So if I'm, especially if I'm going on an exclusionary diet where I might be pulling all my carbs out, or I might be removing grains or bread or stuff, stuff that might have things like B vitamins that you need. If that's not where you're pulling fat and you don't have enough fatty acids. So a good multivitamin, multimineral, something that's high quality, like, you know, Metagenics or Thorne Research or, you know, whatever. Make sure, kind of look at it. If this has magnesium oxide, leave it on the shelf. You want to make sure it's some type of magnesium amino acid chelate. Look for B vitamins. Make sure it has folate, P5P for the B6, some epicobalamin for B12. And that's kind of, so a couple of things you can see that is this a quality product. I think if you don't eat a lot of fish like me, I don't like fishy fish. Reminds me too much of high school, you know, if you know what I'm saying. So I just don't eat fishy fish. It gives me some bad memories of dirty things. So like, I think that a good quality omega-3, like a fish oil, not a flaxseed oil. you don't convert much of alpha-linolenic acid, if I never said that right, to actual EPA. So I would do like a good omega-3, maybe three or four grams a day is probably plenty. If you have digestive issues, work on the brain, but you might also take a digestive enzyme with HCL, pepsin, bile acids, ox bile, tutka, utka, something like that, pancreatic enzymes as well. and creatine man creatine if you don't take creatine you're fucking retarded creatine is like the number one ergogenic agent with no fucking works at least for sports performance that I think that's probably a good like four things or so that's kind of not expensive and highly beneficial works really well together on the creatine there's a lot of cognitive benefits creatine that's shown up in research as well huge huge There's methylation, has methylation properties, it improves your sleep, improves cognition. And yeah, and it puts, you know, if you're a guy, it puts a couple of kilos on you. Yeah a lot of it initially water weight gain but as long as you not fat that actually makes you look better People are scared to put the water weight gain from creatine If you too scared because you think it going to make you look puffy you probably already fat and it doesn matter anyways Don't worry about it. Just take the creatine and get in the caloric deficit, do your cardio and train hard and sleep hard and you'll look good. But yeah, I've been taking creatine now for fuck 30 years. Yeah. and non-stop i think everybody should take that even not even people looking for muscle growth like you should just take that for health probably the most common question i always get asked on instagram how much creatine should i take and when because i know someone's gonna be thinking this right now yeah and this is debatable because people argue about this i i'm still a firm believer in loading it if you haven't been on it for a while and the reason is it's like because it's cool like you put on like two or two and a half kilos like almost instantly it's fucking built up in you instantly within a week if you don't if you're taking like five grams a day it's going to take a couple of months to build up and i'm all about i'm all about um i i look at time as a vector right what's the one thing you can't buy and you can't exchange anything for this time so do i want to wait for two months for this stuff to really build up enough or do i say fuck it and slam it in a week and I've just saved myself three weeks before it hits me, right? It's like the same argument with people talking about the post-workout. There's no magic post-workout window. There is. Now, it's wider than what we think it is, but if we know that post-workout, if you get carbs in within the first like two or three hours or so, you have a 44% increased ability to store glucose as glycogen. That's good. If we think about the fact that you're going to be catabolic to some degree post-workout, you need amino acids and you need some insulin, so carb, protein, amino acids, boom, that creates an anti-catabolic pro-muscle protein synthesis effect. If you lift for 10 years, 10 years, 52 weeks a year, four sessions a week, and you wait for three hours after you train to get your post-workout feed, you've just wasted 6,240 hours you could have been fucking recovering and not catabolic. So, you know, just a side thing. That's math. Math, baby. That's the thing, man. When I was friends with Charles and we would teach, he would say, look, when the bar hits the floor, you take your fucking protein shake. Don't delay. Who gives a fuck if there's not a magic window? At least we don't really know. And if we do know, at least you can optimize it by just getting it done. But yeah, with the creatine, I think most people, five to seven and a half grams a day is good. There's no real special time you need to take it. You don't have to take it after your workout. But if that's convenient, that's good. Just take it. And take a high-quality one. Make sure that it says CreaPure on the bottle. That's the one you want. In regards to intra-workout supplementation, what's your opinion on like carbs into workout eas things like that you know i used to have a i used to have a me me kind of thought with carbs in the workout um when you look into the literature as far as bodybuilding goes i can't really find any direct performance enhancement that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile like if you if you tend to go hypoglycemic when you train like some people do, especially if you're taking things like metformin, insulin, things like that, then you probably want to have a drink. If you're eating a lot of carbs all day, like 800 grams of carbs, and you're having a hard time fitting that in, well, your workout's a perfect time to drink, you know, 100, 200 grams of carbs while you train. You're probably going to be sipping on water anyways. You might as well throw carbs in that. At least then you can leverage glucose sensitivity from all the muscular contractions. And you can also probably make an indirect statement where, well, if I have carbs in the blood, that's going to make my blood kind of thicker blood volume for now. That's going to give me bigger pumps, which might create more microtrauma, which might then stimulate more protein synthesis. I don't know, but it sounds reasonable, right? Yeah. So do I think it's like 100% necessary? If you're eating enough carbs all day before and after you work out probably not if you feel like it uh helps you 30 of your gains is placebo anyways or as i say placebo like placebo is a big thing right so if even if you believe it's working and that makes you work harder and makes you work more intensely fucking go for it eat fucking doo-doo while you train if you think that makes work don't do that that's gross but you know if you think it makes if you think it works then go for it I think that a huge amount of the psychological confidence something can give you whether it works or not It just if you believe it then do it I was in Colorado with Tom Myers a couple of years ago, had a fresh cadaver course. We were on their tough and open dead bodies and shit, and he was talking about therapy, right? And so we asked him, like, how do you do therapy? What's the best therapy? And he's like, look, he goes, everything works by a degree of about 30% even placebo so if you can even if you're doing some stupid shit that doesn't make sense but you convince the client that it's working that's usually enough to stimulate some type of response of getting them pain-free that comes back to what we talked about earlier about getting your brain right because this therapist can convince the person's brain that it's working then the body is it when you got to think about it like this. Okay. So I, I used to be a computer programmer. Um, so, and I love fast car. So I have a lot of computer and fast car analogies. If I look at, uh, the body as a computer, the brain's the processor right now, how do I get input into the brain? Eyes, the factory system, vestibular system, but also proprioception and receptors in my fascia. Right? So you can think fascia being a keyboard the brain processing it and then the muscles of the output so here's the thing if i can if i can use the auditory system um and convince the brain that there's not a problem sometimes that's enough to get 15 20 of the way out of pain and then i can utilize a bunch of other techniques to get them the rest of the way i understand and another question for you in regards to clients and yourself when you're going through a growth phase do you have any specific tactics in terms of keeping people leaner or body fat threshold you look to sit to max people out at because personally I find that quite a no return where people go on like 15 to 16 percent and then it starts to become a bit of a zero-sum gain if that makes sense yeah no I would agree with you I've always kind of had this thought that there's, if you look at one of the main drivers for muscle protein synthesis which is insulin attaching to receptor and then causing a downstream biochemical protein messaging game of telephone to stimulate mTOR and other ways that we grow. If the insulin receptor becomes desensitized because you're insulin resistant now how are you supposed to you're pulling off a big portion of how you're going to recover. So it seems to be at this point where if you get too fat, there's too much inflammation, too many catecholamines, too much insulin resistance to really effectively grow. So you start putting on, you're growing, but you're just growing in tissues you're not really wanting to grow that you're just going to have to pull off later. So I tend to say like, you know, try to get as lean as possible initially. If you're skinny fat, then just do hypertrophy. Because if you're a lean guy, let's say you're high body fat percentage, but it's because you don't have a lot of muscle and you don't have a lot of bone structure, then you probably just need to work on a few years of just eat at maintenance or slightly above, high protein, fucking smash the weights and grow and take D-Bowl if you're predispositioned to do that. Because that's always an easy way to do it, right? Not that I'm encouraging that. But if you're truly fat, like most of the guys in the industry that think they're lean, they're fucking probably 10% fatter than they think they are. You get these guys that go, I'm 12% and they're like, bitch, you're 24%. Put those titties back in that shirt. Most of these guys, they don't get in the deck so they just think they know what body fat looks like. Um, most of the time when you see people who, um, the guys who think they're like the bodybuilders who think they're, people think they're six or seven, 8%, um, uh, or they think they're 3% and they're actually like eight, 9%. Right. So until you have feathering on your glutes, like you're not that lean or not as lean as you're supposed to be for bodybuilding. But I like to stay in a range of let's, let's look at, um, let's try to get an assessment of your body fat. And let's try to get you down close to 12%. I think that's reasonable. That's not that hard. Get you to 12 for a guy. Maybe like 18 for a girl, 19 for a girl, 18 to 20 guys, like 12 to 14. And for the guys, once you start creeping up around 18, it was time for a diet break. When the girls start creeping up around about 25, 26, let's take it back down closer to 20. And I think if you stay in those ranges you can still grow and still look pretty good until you gotten super lean and then anything above like 5 fat for guys and anything above like 12 fat for girls But other than that, if you have a normal mentality about it, I think 12% for guys, about 18% girls. I think at the upper threshold of that, when you start to grow is for guys somewhere probably around 18. That's when you start not looking so good. and so girls somewhere around like you know 20 probably 26 27 something like that i always have that paranoia when i start putting weight in a bulking face my face id and my iphone is not recognizing me yeah that'd be the moment yeah yeah that's i always use that so i always use my i've got uh ultrasound device that you take my body fat and i've got my heart beating calipers so i keep the my calipers at home because i don't use them at the office and every morning i get up and I just do my abdominal skin fold. And if I think if that's below eight, I'm fairly happy. So when it goes above eight, okay, it's time to diet. And then I'll diet it down to like six millimeters and then I'll just eat normally until it's above eight. And that's how I kind of regulate my own because that's kind of the only place I keep it when I get lean. I've shredded, dick skin shredded everywhere else except kind of my fupa, like right around my belly button. So that's kind of my metric that I look at. Do you think that's genetic predisposition, just to where your whole body felt like that? Yeah, you know, I think as much as people want to bash bio-sig, a lot of stuff that not, I mean, obviously not everything, but there was a lot of stuff that Charles said in there that's starting to kind of pan out, actually, like he was saying, and people said it was crazy, and it's actually kind of being a thing. The stuff around the abdomen is pretty well recognized to be stress, whether that's visceral fat or even the subcutaneous fat. Upper back as well. I think what I've noticed is just empirical observation, but Charles came to the same observation and a lot of other coaches I know. A lot of the guys that have blood pressure issues tend to have a really thick scapular fat. And the people that normally have a good blood pressure don't unless you're, well, I say if you're prone to having hypertension and you need to really watch it, they tend to have really thick upper back fat and they tend to have more fragile insulin management systems. So you have to end. So normally when I've done family medical intakes for them, you'll find that like both granddads had diabetes and one of them died from a heart attack. And you'll, you'll hear all this stuff where you see these metabolic issues and it correlates really, but it's not, you know, causation it's correlation. But when you get, when you see it enough times, it starts to become kind kind of reality for me um you know and then you see obviously weird stuff on like women's legs like the guy with body fat distribution and weird things with how how stress modulates estrogen estrogen progesterone we saw a whole fucking thing on this igf1 like uh there i can't remember what book it was there is a really good book on this and it looks at like people's faces and how like droopy eyelids and how they've seen that in blood growth hormone and all this weird wacky stuff you know that kind of side bum that girls have yeah not the you know it's not the saddlebag it's like they got a butt and then they got a little tiny butt underneath it you know what i mean yeah it's like a little butt pouch right it's where they store acorns and shit i don't know um but uh man that book hit spot on with like low igf and i shit you not i um the girls that I've trained that are, they're on the PED wagon, which is not a lot, like most of my clients and my muscle nerds clients, not a lot of them are on any drugs at all, which is not, we just don't attract that because we, when we do tell people what to take, they ask for it. We, it's very low dose and they're like, well, fuck that. I can go to this guy. He's going to tell me to take everything. I'm like, cool, go to that guy. But the girls who do maybe take some peptides or whatever, I shit you not, man, they start taking something for igf and for growth hormone they might take cdc 1295 maybe some epimeralan or uh ghr6 or something like that ghrp6 um that fucking double bum goes away and that book i shit you not says that that's an igf1 deficiency and you'll see you'll give them you they'll get on peptides and all of a sudden that little double bum will and it'll just disappear and that's the only thing you change It's amazing how your body can be manipulated in fat storage and locations like that by somebody. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Charles had one protocol where you would rub, it sounds crazy. There's a company in America, they don't make this anymore, I don't think it's, Wise Woman Herbals and it was like a licorice gel and it was made of all things for herpes.

If you had a herpes lesion, you'd put it on the cold sores and shit. And it had licorice and lysine in it. And he was convinced that if you put that on your abs when you're losing weight, you will push more fat out of the abs. And we thought he was crazy. And then we did it, and we were like, holy shit, this fucking works. And he would talk about, at that time, his theory of it was that it blocked cortisol receptors. And then when I started looking into it, I actually found a lot of research talking about 11-beta-HSD, which is what converts. There's a type 1 and type 2. One of them converts cortisol to cortisone. One converts cortisone to cortisol. And different compounds, it actually stops the conversion of cortisone to cortisol. And now this is conjecture pulling all this shit out of my ass because it's just thoughts I've had while I've looked into the literature and pieced it together. I can't actually prove it. But it seems to me that one of the mechanisms to why that worked is that it possibly is keeping the conversion to cortisol low. So then cortisol is not binding its receptor and this is happening in the cell. So it's, you're not going to measure this with serum cortisol because it's happening in the cell. It seems to me that that might be a possible mechanism of why it works because I can't explain it, but I can tell you it works. especially if you were lean enough. We would have people training hard, training hard, not losing any millimeters off their stomach. We'd rub. I wouldn't rub. I'd tell them to rub licorice all over their stomach, that specific stuff. And I shit you not, a week later, they'd lost four millimeters off their abs. It was the nuttiest thing. One thing I always find amazing is how random products work like that, which I'm designed for it. Yeah. That's always pretty awesome to think. I mean, you know, Lon McDonald was talking about, you know, a couple of decades ago, uh, you'll have been like, uh, injecting you'll have been into the fat on the legs. And then we were all stupid. We were all making this shit back then. Right. Um, and, uh, and then we started using things like DMSO and trying to make transdermal creams. And, you know, it's a lot of companies that have products just like that, where they use some type of transdermal carrier, they use your handband and it seems to work for people, of managing lower body fat without giving you that creepy, gross, dirty Johanben feel that you get when you take Johanben. Because Johanben will massively fuck up your sympathetic system. Yeah, so the MPA Vasoburn product is something I've used, which has topical Johanben in it. Matt Porter stuff? Yeah, Matt Porter's. That's very, very good. Very good Just make sure you don rub it in your eyes or in your balls because you got Oh bro Yeah Don take don take a bath after you put that shit on because I can guarantee it going to get everywhere One last question. Where do you think you see the fitness scene and industry going over the next few years? Obviously you've been in the game respectfully for a while. I've seen a few changes. Do you think there's anything big on the horizon or do you think it's going to be more marketing spiel and spin perhaps? more marketing more more 24-hour experts uh you'll see less and less people actually know what they're doing and that's the thing like that's the problem with the internet now is when i got into this we didn't even have the internet so um you know it was like reading out of books and talking to other coaches or other other people that were older and doing this stuff and i mean when i started even when i started online training i was one of the first dudes online training this is back in the mid-2000s i was sending programs on a fax machine and uh we didn't have it was all done by hand it was handwritten then you type it out on word and then you fax it to your client you call them on a fucking landline because we didn't i didn't have a cell phone you talked to him on a cell phone on the landline but i think everything goes in waves um in the it's just a perpetual cycle of things repeating themselves high car or low carb, high fat, high carb, low fat, high fat, low carb. I think one thing with nutrition is everybody's going to go carb crazy again. And they think they're going to magic. They thought they were magic snowflakes and couldn't have carbs. And now they're going to think they're magic snowflakes. And now they can have all the carbs. And they're going to find out that you guys need to stop swinging the pendulum to the extremes. And you got to find somewhere in the middle. I think that probably too a lot of governments are going to start cracking down harder and making it harder to have credentials because the market is very saturated. And 95% of people that have gone into this industry are in it for the wrong reasons. And they don't take it seriously enough. They think it's easy money and they think it's a cool job or whatever. I think that, um, I think you're going to start saying like what you said with the genetic stuff, you're going to start seeing a lot more of that type of marketing, the genetic stuff, um, trying to tell you how you should lift, how you should be this, how you should be that. And I mean, honestly, I just, I never have a good optimistic, uh, viewpoint of where we're going because I've been there and done that on the rollercoaster so many times. It's like, it just the same shit every 10 years honestly Rich repeat everything goes in cycles Yeah And you going to have there always going to be fighting from different dogmatic, cult-like sectors of the industry. The bros against the evidence-based guys, you know, the low carb against the high carb, you know, protein kills your kidneys. There's always going to be all this misinformation. But it's good for us because there's always an endless stream of people who need help and they're all misinformed. The problem is that we need to get more coaches more well-informed and we need to get them to fall in love with the science of what we do because they all want to know how to do advanced type of surgery, advanced fat loss, advanced carb cycling, but they don't know how that shit actually works in the body. If you understand how all this stuff works, give it a specific stimulus, it makes programming, it makes understanding stuff a lot easier so um because when i started teaching like nutritional biochemistry and exercise metabolism i was like nobody's gonna want to know this and that's the most popular thing that people want me to teach them when i go to class like what do you guys want to learn biochemistry shit but we attract a different crowd than a lot of the other industry right they're not really interested in crazy techniques they want to learn how to fundamentally and basically get people where they need to be without going full potato with crazy programming that most gen pop people don't need anyways i think that's testimony to the advanced knowledge you have so all credit credit to you and like it's been a a pleasure of a conversation someone's taking a lot of knowledge from today so i'm sure the audience have as well um so for people to find a bit more information about you and whether when this crap's over you can run in courses again in camps again yes man man i'm getting cabin fever i need to get on a plane i'm in a plane in almost a year um so yeah we will we will get back to it so we i mean we've got some programs that we've done you know online uh we just released a very inexpensive eight-hour nutritional with foundational nutrition that goes through um the psychology of things things you wouldn't think about like if you're like you're in the uk right so you got to think you've got a melting pot of different cultures so if you if you're working at a gym and you get an indian guy you need to know how that culture goes you need to know what religion are you because there's going to be food exclusionary issues and there's going to be um food is going to revolve around like family and culture type of stuff so you could have like an irish guy you have you know you could have a an Asian guy you could have African American whatever Jewish guy So they all going to have different exclusionary things for the diets and they going to have different cultural ideas around their food. So we go into a lot of that stuff and people's belief systems like, for God's sake, stop trainers. Stop. If you're not a vegan and you love meat, like I do, stop trying to convert the vegans to meat eaters. It doesn't work, right? It's like, you know, it's like trying to convert a gay guy to being not gay. Don't. Just let them do what they want to do. The vegans have a certain belief system that they love animals or they think it's a morally superior diet. But what we need to do is we need to learn how to work with those people instead of challenging their belief system because it just turns them off to the industry when every asshole coach tries to change what they inherently believe. So we teach that type of stuff. We teach about relative energy deficiency, how to create calories, why you do this, go in depth in protein biochemistry and where protein goes and what it does, carbs, fats, all that stuff, how to structure all this stuff out. So we call it like a basic course, but my version of basic is a bit different than what other people think is basic. And what I think you should know at a foundational level is far different than what you normally learn at a foundational level. So we have program design, which is our monster course. That's the one you pay one time and you just go through it as many times as you need to, to understand everything. We keep adding to it. And I'm about to write a gut course that we're going to release soon to compliment the nutrition one. Awesome. And where's the best place for people to find out some more about you? Social media handles? Yeah. Muscle nerds underscore health. If you want to learn about the muscle nerds company, if you just like really unpolitically correct memes you can come to my instagram which is luke lehman lea man on instagram we're on facebook we don't do a lot on that stuff you know most people don't um and then www.musclenerds.net is our main website and also iopcgem.au which is our gem here in brisbane awesome absolute pleasure and thank you so much for your time today yeah man that was an incredible episode of the shredder show with luke lehman and we'll definitely be having him back on the podcast i know you guys will have found that incredibly insightful helpful and knowledgeable please make sure you leave us five star reviews we can get more world-class results guests to help educate you guys and provide you with more knowledge information to help you crush it this year if you want me to help you guide you through 2021 to get your results with speed and clarity when it comes to building muscle mass burning body fat if you hit the link below the podcast we can book in a free six-pack strategy call with myself and CJ coaching team and we will see you in the next episode of the podcast