Blood Pressure and Cardiovascular Health for Bodybuilders

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.