The Global System and Bodybuilding History

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.