Least Mode, Important Metrics to Track

# Least Mode, Important Metrics to Track

**Channel:** Jeffrey Hoehn - Mind Muscle Connection Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=xALZeD0yXZc

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Mind Muscle Connection podcast. Today I have a very special guest on, Luke Lehman. He is a co-founder of Muscle Nerds, and he has over 20 years experience in the health and fitness industry. He's done things like fitness equipment sales, personal training, strength coaching, stretch therapy, massage, sports nutrition, supplement sales, mentoring, and like we just talked about off air, he's currently speaking, doing some public speaking as well right now. So Luke, I appreciate you taking time out of your day and coming on here. Yes, sir. Did you? It's like you went to the CIA or the FBI and you got my whole back. No one's ever come up with every single thing I've done. That's crazy. Yeah, that's usually what I do before all these episodes, run a background check on you. No, but I actually got it from LinkedIn. I searched and just grabbed the bio from there. But I thought it was cool to chat about how you've done different aspects of the fitness industry. I thought that would be pretty cool to touch on. Yeah, man, I've done it all. To be honest, I'm like the CrossFit of fitness industry guys. I'm like, just put my hands in a bit of everything. Yeah, so like I started early training for high school football as we do in Texas. So I started eight years old and with some really good coaches too. So it wasn't like your usual high school football coaches that let you lift like crap and pound you into the sand. So did obviously football, baseball, but I stopped that before high school. Basketball, a little bit in high school. Power lifting all through high school. Track and field all through high school. and then yeah so after I left I went to college I started getting into bodybuilding I lost my love for powerlifting at the time because that was back when everything was about the equipped lifting and I hated it I hated it I didn't think I didn't think I I respect it and I understand like it is very technical and it is difficult but to me it would be like Usain yeah like racing Usain Boltz but having rocket skates on but just to me it doesn't so I was the dummy who would train raw and then show up and put my suit on at the meet. I had no idea how to use it. Did bodybuilding for a while. I went back to powerlifting, did some physique shows. Currently, I've been doing like jujitsu competitions, but I haven't done that in a couple of years. It's been too busy. And yeah, in that period, I went through, I was a manager at GNC, so I sold supplements for a while. I worked a long time selling fitness equipment. In fact, right now I'm in Austin, Texas with one of my friends I've known for about 20 years. And he's one of the guys I went into the fitness sales industry with. So he still does that, but gave me a good insight on like quality of equipment and all that. And I started training business kind of in conjunction with that, where I would go train people before I went to work and go to work all day and go train people after work. So that's where I first started doing my old, most of my personal training as a career. Then, yeah. So then went to see Charles Poliquin. Like he was the guy for me. I came up with Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Paul Check, all those guys, TMAG, Muscle Media, and then finally went to meet Charles and eventually ended up working for him and eventually took over, not took over his position, but took over his spot lecturing, teaching at BioSig, the PICP stuff and all that. Then I left and started Muscle Nerds and decided to go off on a different route. So at Polycon Group, we're teaching people how to train professional athletes. And I quickly realized no one in class trained any athletes. You might have one or two people out of 60 who only train professional athletes. Everybody else has trained normal people. So when we started our company, my wife and I, we decided we'll go, we'll start teaching how to train normal people, but train them like athletes, but scale it down so it's somewhat feasible for them. So like a zero to hero type of. Awesome. Yeah. I was curious to maybe if the audience isn't too familiar with muscle nerds. First of all, I love the name, right? Muscle nerds. I love that combination there. Yeah. Maybe explain what you just did there, but what kind of got you to start muscle nerds and what does muscle nerds do? I know you've explained it, but I'm curious to hear a little bit more detail there on that. So I had the idea, I registered the name and had the idea on the side, like a back burner, just in case I left Pelican Group. And when I did, it was like, all right, what are we going to do? I've been teaching people how to train Olympic athletes for years. I'd rather look at, nobody's really teaching how to train gen pop correctly. It's either like sports medicine-y type stuff or like really watered down. It's a lot of the certifications that you would take for normal people treated normal people like they were 80 years old. It was all BOSI ball squats and shit like that. And I was like, man, that's not, we can take programs that Olympic athletes train with and we can dial them down and make them scalable for normal people and figure out how to get people strong because you know i when i growing up in the industry when i first became a trainer you saw no women at the gym like the only women at the gym there might be three girls that had to shave their backs because they were on so much diana ball and they were competitors you didn't it was nothing like it is now where there's so many more women and women are now interested in getting strong back then women were they might walk in and do the yoga or they might do body combat or zumba or something like that but now it they actually look at hey look at these strong women on online and they're not bulky and i can be strong too so it's been a really cool transition to that so when when we left paul can group i said we're gonna we'll attack the the part of the industry that no one's talking about just normal people how to train normal people and not You've got like the evidence-based crowd, which they're basically literature-based, they're paper-based, it's all sterile stuff in a lab. How can I blend looking at literature with also my experience under the bar and training normal people and getting them really brutally strong? How do we blend those two together to make something that makes sense? It's still, it's evidence-informed, as Dr. Laura Bannock says, not exactly evidence-based. And so we started getting into that and saying, as well, like no one was selling health. It was like it was performance. If you look at all the courses that were out there, advanced hypertrophy, advanced fat loss, advanced this, advanced that, man, we'll train anybody who's advanced enough to need that stuff. So we said, we're going to teach basic fundamental program design, basic fundamental nutrition, which isn't exactly sexy, but it works and it works across the board for everybody. And that provides the fundamental bottom layer, that tall pyramid that we talk about when we talk about performance. Yeah, no, that's awesome. So it sounds like you're, like you said, you're really hitting the gen pop client, the people that really need to help the most, not the kind of high-end athlete, but it sounds like it's based on body composition, but also like health focus, but also even like performance too. So it sounds like you blend all those together there with, with kind of your methods. That's right. That's right. So like when we teach program design, goals are important. And a lot of times general population, they'll come in and say, if it's a woman, I just want to lose some weight. Okay. Let's be more specific of what you want. And the thing is weight loss in and of itself, isn't going to be enough. We need to have other metrics that we can drive things. So let's look at health metrics. And then let's look at, I like to get three goals when I'm running a program. So what's a body composition goal, what's a strength goal or goals, and what's a conditioning goal. If you have those three things, you can develop a really nice program that covers all, ticks all the boxes, covers all the bases. And then it keeps people interested in training because it's not just about how they look. We get them more interested in how they feel and also how they're performing. And they end up, you end up keeping clients for five, six, seven, eight years, because there's always a new cool goal they can go for. And that's what we should be doing. A lot of people, I think that coaches often think that everybody loves to train as much as we do. And they don't. For a lot of people, just going to the gym and doing their hour and patting themselves on the back is enough. And they don't really, a lot of people don't even like to do it. They just do it because they feel like they need to, or the doctor said they had to, or they don't feel good about themselves. It's okay. Our goal should be, let me teach you how to fall in love with what we're doing and then make you do just what you're comfortable doing. Because I know that in a year you're going to be doing 50 to 60% more than that. And the following year, 56% more than that, make them really embrace that culture and want to be in the gym and want to drive towards big, hairy, audacious goals. Yeah, no, that's awesome. I do think that's when somebody does get into fitness, it is all about looks and that's the main thing, which, Hey, anything that can get you into it, I think is important, but then I do think it does become just about that. And like you said, connecting those dots, like how you feel is super important. And like you said, that helps people stick with it long-term. And I feel like as a by-product of that, they do improve their look in the process. That's it. And look, form follows function. So if we look at, you could just do a body composition. It's very, even for body composition, a lot of people don't really need a trainer for that. To be honest, they need an accountability person. They need to have somebody slapping a donut out of their hands because body composition is really easy. You go in and you lift three to five days a week, do a little cardio, get a lot of sleep, control what goes in your mouth, basically control starvation. You'll create a really nice looking physique. That's the simple formula for someone in the formula. But then when we layer performance gets a little bit more intensive because performance, depending what we're looking at, is quite more advanced when it comes to programming. There's a lot more dials to turn a lot more box a lot more flip is switches the flip right yeah and yeah and there's it's probably a little bit i feel like with the physique it's probably just pretty straightforward in terms of how you look at that but like you said there with the performance there's a lot of different metrics that you can potentially look at there let's kind of park that because i did i do specifically want to talk about programming for gen pop and whatnot and i think that's a good way to kind of preface that before we dive into that i i am curious just uh to hear a little bit more about your training before we dive into that and then we'll come back to that so we can set the framework there for that. What does training nutrition look like for you at this moment? Yeah. All right. So for training, I decided, I decided, so we'll go back, we'll go back a few years ago. So I got back into jujitsu. So I've got a traditional background of Japanese jujitsu judo taekwondo and a few other arts And I tried to do jujitsu Brazilian jujitsu before it got super popular There was a place down the street from my house and I went in and it was just super weird to me because i wasn the guys like the professionals like okay joe here is going to lay on the ground and you're going to get in between his legs and i was like what i'm going to do what and i did a couple of sessions so then i went and did muay thai and got my ass handed to me by 135 pound thai kickboxer but so i went back to it about five years ago. I was like, I'll give it another shot. And I fell in love with it. Like everybody who gets into it does. So my training at that point was basically all jujitsu 12 to 15 hours a week and all, and no lifting. I didn't do any lifting in that time. And for my first competition, cause I was trying to cut my weight down to 92 kilos. And that's really hard for me if I'm lifting weights. So I went from 115 kilos, which is like what, 250 pounds. And I got down until 92, which is somewhere around like 200 pounds. And I did that in about six or seven months and then competed and did really well. Then after that, I got too busy. So I kept training, but I couldn't compete. And then this past year in April, I decided, you know what, I'm going to do a triathlon. Why not? I've done one sprint triathlon in my life. I did well on the run and the bike, but I can't, I don't, can't swim competitively. So I have to learn how to swim correctly. And then I decided I don't have, I'm traveling right now for three months. I don't have time to swim. So I'm training for a duathlon instead because I can still cycle and run. So most of my training has been that and a lot of Olympic weightlifting. And so basically tons of cardio. So probably easily sometimes an hour and a half to two hours a day of cardio plus possibly a Olympic weightlifting session too. But the last five weeks since I've been traveling, I've done nothing. So I've just been, I've been teaching almost every day so i've been hammering it this week so it's pretty exhausting jumping back into it but yeah and i don't particularly enjoy it and i think that's why i do it because i don't like it so i hate getting on the bike for an hour and going out for a run right after it but i feel great after it's done i just don't like the process of it so i just keep doing it and i don't know i don't know why i don't know why i like the effects though man i'm getting shredded as fuck. It's my TDEs like 4,200 to 4,500 a day. So I'm like, you're asking me about diet and I'm home in Texas. I haven't been home in almost four years. I'm eating burritos, fry burrito, queso, you name it. And it doesn't even, as long as I control my portions, I eat whatever I want. I don't even care right now. Are you, is your body weight kind of staying the same? I know you said you're obviously getting shredded, but is it still around that 92 kilo, like 200 pound mark? Or is it, did it go back up a little bit and then back down? I'm curious to hear where that's at right now. It went up a little bit while I was in Dubai and between Dubai, Netherlands and London. And they got here. It went up a few kilos. But when I lecture, I don't eat anything all day. I basically do an OMAD diet because I just I don't know why I just don't like to eat when I lecture. So I'll just I just don't eat all day. One big ass meal. But the problem is I'm out with friends and colleagues who are drinking a lot and we're staying out late, things like that. And I got a little bit sick over the past month. So I did, I bloated up a little bit, but three or four sessions in, it's already popping right off. Yeah. Yeah. Just cause yeah, obviously with as much as you're expending energy wise, it makes sense that you're just able to do, do anything there with that from a nutrition perspective. With that, you mentioned that you're, you're doing a couple hours of cardio per day. Is it like, what's the kind of the intensity there? Is it pretty high intensity cardio throughout, or is it like pretty structured or you just right now with traveling and everything like that? Just, yeah, just feeling it out based on how you, how you're feeling and recovering and stuff. now it's highly structured the one thing I can always do without fail is I can always run because all I need is my sneakers right sneakers my headphones because I got I got to have tunes I can't do the running without the tune so that can I can always do and then the cycling if I can find a place with a even just an echo bike or an assault bike I can make it work it's not ideal for what I'm doing but it works so I can do both of those pretty consistently but I do I do have a very structured plan, but it's also flexible. For example, this morning I was going to do a brick and the cycling portion is pretty nasty. It's like neuromuscular sprints and a lot of like maximal aerobic power stuff. So it absolutely throttles you. And I supposed to do that and then go out for a really easy zone to run with 45 minutes, nothing. But my buddy I'm staying with, it's his day to run. So I was like, I'll just run with him so we can hang out. And then I'll do the bike and I got on the bike and I was like, that was a big mistake. So I just, I got through three nasty sprints and went, all right, I'm just going to do, I'll finish out with just zone two work and be done with it. And then did about 30 minutes of weightlifting and I was done. Yeah. So just being flexible there when you need to. And probably the takeaway there is don't do your lighter intensity stuff before the higher intensity stuff. Yeah. Don't throttle yourself. And I did an 80 minute run yesterday. So that was, I been yeah So I pretty pretty tired but I like when I want to not even just for the performance when I want to lean out I would rather try to bank a bit of extra time to do more work I would rather actually do more cardio and still be able to eat more than eat less because I love to eat. So you have this, I love continuums to me, everything's in a continuum. So on one side, you have the way I like to do it, which is try to get TDE up really high because then let's say you have a 750 calorie deficit. If your TDEE is 4,200, you're still eating 3,500 and you're getting lean. Now on the opposite side, you could starve yourself and do minimal effective volume, which is totally fine, but I'd get too hungry that way. I'm miserable, so I won't do it. So like you asked earlier about gen pop, I think somewhere in between those two things is pretty good. So if you can get some daily activity, whether that's, you got to do the weightlifting, you got to take that off. What's the minimal you need? Two or three days a week of lifting, if you're trying to lean out is probably enough to preserve muscle. You can do a hell of a lot of cardio as long as you keep it to low intensity. It's the high intense stuff that's going to throttle you and it's going to build the fatigue and it's going to, as they say, start burning your muscle, which I haven't seen that to be the case with myself or any of my clients. But it really depends on keeping your calories variable and saying, all right, so if I'm going to add, say, 700 calories of cardio, I'm going to have to add that back. Because what people normally will do is they'll set their calories at an ambiguous, let's say 2000 calories, and then I'll add a shit ton of cardio, not understanding that their deficit is now like 2000 calories. No wonder you're losing muscle mass and you can't sleep and you're miserable. And you're freaking hungry all day long and everything like that too. And if you're going to be that hungry, you might as well just do the minimal amount of work and starve yourself. Yeah. So your thought on that is, Hey, definitely ramp up the cardio if you want, if you have the time to commit to it, but just really make sure that you are like making sure that you aren't going too large with that deficit. Cause that's when you'll run into the muscle loss and things like that. And obviously make sure you continue to train weight, train and stuff like that, which, which kind of brings me to your point there. You said you're doing some weightlifting. What is it because you're specifically training for what you're training for that you're incorporating weightlifting? And maybe I misunderstood. Is it like Olympic weightlifting or weightlifting, but just like weight training. Okay. So it's Olympic weightlifting. When I say weightlifting, I'm talking Olympic weightlifting. Yeah. Yeah. So my kind of question on that is, is there any, is it because of the way, the thing that you're training for that you need to train Olympic weightlifting, or do you find that's just more effective for you to get done in a short amount of time? Or yeah, what does that look like? Man? I just, I love it. I love it. I love how technical it is. It, when you're doing it correctly, because my coach is a Chinese weightlifting coach. So everything has, you have to stay within the parameters because everything's about technique and speed. It's not really about how much weight you're lifting. So we do still lift heavy sometimes, but most of it is just a lot of sets of submaximal work and just working on being better positionally, technically, and then moving the bar faster. So I got into velocity-based training a while back and I love that too, but it's just a pain in the ass to set the equipment up. But it's nice because you can look at, all right, I can put high mass and slower acceleration, or I can lower the mass a little bit and raise the acceleration, you're still getting the same force output. So if you can equalize things, obviously the high mass is going to give you more tension, which is going to be more stimulus for muscle building, but you can also offset that just by adding some sets. So I would rather just add some sets and move the bar faster. Plus I'm 45 years old. So my days of wanting to squat 700 pounds again, like when I was in my mid twenties, like that's over for me. I know a lot of guys still love that stuff, but I've seen too many of my colleagues in their fifties getting hip replacements, knee surgeries, all this other shit. I don't want to, I'm not, I don't want to be that dude. Like I, I can move really well. I can do the splits. I got full range of motion of my joints. I'm going to keep that. And I don't care that I can't squat 500 pounds anymore. I'm okay with that because I can move 315 pounds really fast. Yeah. And it's more enjoyable. You enjoy that. And then from my understanding too, probably one of the, as you age, not that you're old by any means, but as you age, like one of the things that go down, obviously is muscle mass, but the power aspect of it is really what seems to go down. So if you can keep some of that in there, that's going to be super helpful as you age as well too. That's it. It's, you look at things like speed development goes down, also reactive force. So your ability to decelerate and create stopping power and then re-accelerate goes down as well. And so I started thinking about this about a year and a half ago, especially training older populations that we probably should be training older populations with more plyometrics. And you could look at Olympic weightlifting as being a plyometric movement, but it's scalable and controllable and small things like ankle hops and Romanian rhythm squats, jumping. Those are the things that we're going to lose and they're hard to get back. And mobility is hard to get back. If I can create a stimulus to stay muscular and keep performing and move well without bashing up my joints and while creating still having elasticity in my muscles, I prefer that the

half of my life because eventually if you're moving the bar fast you're adding more that strength is always there if i want to i want to deadlift 250 or 250 kilos like i could do that if i want to or i just move 200 really fast and do a clean pull it's the same essentially this almost the same movement i'm just sacrificing some load on the bar for acceleration and so do you do any like dedicated hypertrophy work at this point in time or with maybe your with all the training you have to do it's that's just something that is maybe taking a back seat or yeah or do you or do you count your olympic weightlifting as hypertrophy if i want if i i will still keep some accessory work we still do some heavy squats heavy front squats do a lot of heavy pullovers i still bench even though that's not something that you're really going to see don't tell my coach but i'm still a meathead i'm still going to do some heavy benching but most of the stuff i do now is a lot of reverse band stuff so that I can deload it at the shoulders. And I find, I actually find that's a more optimal way to train the bench for almost everybody, since that's the most fragile positions. Even when I lift super heavy, I'm almost always reverse band bench, reverse band squat, reverse band deadlift, because it's going to, it's going to take load off at the fragile positions. B, it allows for variable weight. So by altering the resistance curve, I'm not limited by that fragile position. So if I'm benching, like right now, 125, 125 kilos at the chest, I can push that up, but I can't push 130 right now, but I can put reverse band and I can neutralize that to 125 at the bottom, but then have it 150 at the top. So for me, it's a, it's a more often way to train even for hypertrophy because I've essentially given myself more load and more stimulus while also protecting myself from the fragile positions. Awesome. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. there on that. It's a way to, like you said, match up the resistance profile, but also just maybe take off some of that extra weight that could be again, from a long-term standpoint, joint health and things like that too. So awesome. Yeah. It was cool. Cool. Learn about your training. Super interesting to hear what you're training for and stuff like that. I always like to dive into that and just get a background on that. Plus we were able to cross-reference some of that stuff for people to take practically as well. So yeah, let's dive into the topic. Like we were hitting on, you have with muscle nerds, you guys, you focus on body comp, but also overall health and performance, which I love. I think that's great. So maybe we can talk about your lease mode. I think you coined that a while back, lease mode. So I'm curious to hear about that. I think it's super cool to chat about that. So maybe just go over in the background of that, and then we can dive into some specific questions on it. Yeah. So it's an ever-evolving type of concept. The beginning of it was a friend of mine, Zach Trowbridge, we were talking about, we were laughing at people training on Instagram. He was sending me videos and goes, hashtag beast mode. I'm like, man, that is not beasting it out. That is actually not that heavy. And that they're not even hitting any slow reps. Like they're not really lifting as hard as they could. And he said, it's more like hashtag least mode. And I was like, man, that's brilliant. So I wrote that down and I started thinking about, again, a continuum and thinking, okay, you've got this continuum from being able to beast things out versus being taking like backing off a little bit. So there's a lot of elements that go on this. part of it is looking at your metrics and saying, okay, if you have high blood pressure, high resting heart rate, low HRV, you might think about shifting left and going to that least mode side and focusing on the things that are going to get your metrics better, more aerobic work, aerobic intervals, maybe thinking about more metabolic style lifting, more rest, more recovery stuff. And then when your metrics get better, slide up the scale to the B side until you see the metrics crumble again, because then you know you're overreaching and then shuttle back over to the left a little bit to recover your metrics so it became this kind of evolving continuum of this yin and yang you know your yin stuff being the least mode of your yang stuff being the beast mode and understanding when it's time to go one direction versus the other which is it's really nice that the biometrics and modern technology allow us to keep a really good handle on that and and really easy to measure that stuff. Yeah. There are a ton of biometrics that you can track now, which I think is great. So maybe we can hit, so it sounds like least mode is going to be, Hey, instead of just going straight to it, which you see a lot of people, they want to improve their look, right? So it's like they come straight into it and they want to do that beast mode, or maybe that's how they used to train when they were like 20 years old right now, obviously a little bit older. And so some of those metrics might be off easing the client back into it and making sure that they're in a good spot to actually be able to see results. Right. Cause I'm imagining you go straight into beast mode. It's you're just, body's not in a good spot to actually be able to make change at that point. So you hit on a couple of metrics there. Why are those important? I know you hit on HRV, resting heart rate. I can't remember. I think blood pressure was the other one. What's the importance of those for people and maybe why they need to start paying attention to that? Yeah we mainly use heart rate and blood pressure just because they a bit more they a bit more accurate than HRV HRV can be all over the place depending on the technology you using how they calculating that what the scoring system is So every device is going to have a slightly different scoring system. We've gotten, gotten away from teaching HRV the way we used to, because we used to use elite HRV and we do do a five minute reading in the morning or whatever, and then do use that as a proxy. But the problem was that people would see one bad score on their HRV and go, oh, I can't train. So no, that's one bad score, one good score. That's not what counts. We need to see a trend one direction or the other and then pull out of it at that point. So we had to dial back and I've got to figure a better way of teaching it so that trainers and also people that are training don't look at that and make hyper reactive responses based on that number. And everybody's HRV is going to be different. So we have a broad range of where you should be. But if you're sitting at a number and that's supposedly a bad number, but you feel good, you're recovering, you're sleeping, your appetite's good, you don't have any symptoms of being overly stressed, then maybe that's just your number, right? So what we've done lately is teaching people, if you're going to monitor your HRV, monitor it and then write down, keep a diary of how you feel that day. and then when you don't feel right, make a note of that and see if the numbers change. And when you feel really good, make a note of that and see how the numbers change. And over time, you'll find what number is best for you and you'll find what range is best for you and that's your range, right? Now with the heart rate and the blood pressure, there's a lot of literature on this that shows standard ranges for lowering all-cause mortality. So we know pretty much for blood pressure, staying under 120 over 80 is the right way of being, right? So anything above that is prehypertension. Then you get to stage one, stage two, and even stage three hypertension. And blood pressure is a nice proxy for having a cardiovascular event. So if you have stage one, stage two blood pressure, to me, that's like a check engine light on your car. You better think about taking that in and let the mechanic look at that. And the same thing with resting heart rate. And I think when I tell people what the literature says about the optimal resting heart rate, especially when you're trained, it boggles the mind because there's a few papers I've looked at where 45 beats per minute, if you're well-trained, seems to be the optimal of staying under that. And then anything above that slowly starts to, in a linear manner, starts to increase your risk for some type of cardiovascular event. The only problem is getting that low isn't practical because most people don't have the time to do the amount of work that's going to take. They're not willing to do the work with stress management or they're stressed to the hill. like my friend I'm staying with, he's got two little boys and trying to get them up for school is a, it's a, it's a mission trying to get them to go to bed. It's a mission. So it's not practical to think that everybody's going to be able to hit that magic number. So we think I like somewhere below 62, optimally somewhere in the fifties is probably pretty good. And that's not that difficult to get. As long as you clean up your diet, as long as you do some cardio, as long as you don't take too much with the weights don't get too crazy with the weights especially high neural stuff like always lifting super heavy and going to like trying to go past failure it's not that difficult to get to those levels if you just make the effort but that stuff is super important and that's the the side of what we teach which is we prioritize health and fitness over performance and you can't perform if you're not healthy or rather genetic freaks can perform whether they're healthy or not but that's those are outliers for the rest of us mere mortals it's really important to understand that the better your metrics are the better you're going to perform and the faster you're going to make progress so if you get a new client somebody comes in are these like kind of the first things that you're looking at making sure that those are in a good spot before you map out like a game plan for them 100 because if they come in and they have 140 over 90 blood pressure and they're sitting at 90 resting heart rate the the last thing we're going to do is 321 wave loading and hit intervals on a salt bite. The first thing we're going to do is, okay, we're going to do, we're going to find some type of aerobic output method that we're going to use that you can do. So it's either you're just doing standard steady state, or if you don't have time for that, or you hate it, we might do aerobic intervals, but we're going to do something like that. When we look at the weight training, we're going to go with what's the minimal effective volume that we need. And we're going to stick to things that are more metabolic in nature. We're not going to think about five by fives or three to one wave loading, or God forbid putting weight releases on the bar. We'll get there eventually, but we need to get your cardiovascular system healthy first. Then if you can just spend a few months getting all that stuff nice and tidy, then you can drop the hammer and you can cut the brakes on the car for a bit and you'll be okay. But if you already jacked up and you start jacking yourself up with more training it either going to lead to injury or it going to lead to worse long outcomes as far as your health and cardiovascular system and even your brain and your kidneys everything else. Because we talk about this a lot in our, we've got an online hypertension course where we talk about what does the research say? What do they say is the best protocols, how to reverse this stuff, supplements, nutrition training, all of that. And it's boggling when you look at some of the outcomes the literature says of like how quickly you can go into disarray if you don't take care of this stuff. So let's put the piece of the puzzle where they're supposed to go. Let's get the outside of the puzzle in before we start filling in the inside. And so if they come to us and already pretty jacked up, we'll try to talk them into pumping the brake a bit and dial them back and say, look, you may not want to do this, but you need to do this. It's my job to tell you what the best protocol is going to be. So this is what you're going to do. And we can drop the hammer later and you're going to make such better results later when your body's working tip top shape. Yeah. Like you said, making sure everything on their hood's good and that will follow everything. Cause otherwise you hit on it. Let's say you, I guess two questions off this, you get somebody that comes in and they are trying to change and all those things are jacked up. And let's say they're like, no, I'm going beast mode. It's just, your body's not going to be, my understanding, your body's just not going to be responsive to what you're trying to do to it. So you're almost going to feel like you're spinning your wheels, working super hard. So maybe hit on that. But also, is there a certain, somebody might hear this and think, oh, I work out regularly. I don't have to worry about this. But do you see people that they do work out regularly and these things are still jacked up? Yeah. So I'll give you an example. When we first started teaching this, I would carry my blood pressure cuff all over the world. And I'd make all the coaches take their blood pressure. And in one seminar, we had 60 people in London. them. And so there were three, maybe four people who were under 120 over 80. It was me and three people that we trained. Everybody else was either stage one or stage two. And we had one guy that was 210 over a hundred blood pressure. So I'm like, man, you guys got to get your shit straight, man, because we're supposed to be the billboard of being healthy and fit. And none of you guys are healthy and fit. So I just, I went on a tirade about them getting their shit together. and then now when I do a seminar and I pass around the blood pressure cup everybody's got perfect blood pressure every single coach because they've been in our programs they've heard us talk about this so they started doing their aerobic work they started taking care of their cardiovascular health and and now yeah now I can I can have good faith that most of them are taking blood pressure in their facilities and they're taking care of their clients and that's we've heard a lot of facilities that use our protocols as their de facto standard for their facility every coach has to do it and I think that's a great thing because it, we have a responsibility to take care of our clients. No one comes in. Hey, I'd like to squat 400 pounds and I'd like to, I'd like to put on 10 pounds of muscle. I'd also like to have a heart attack or stroke. Can, can you hook that up for me? Yeah. I haven't heard one person say that. So yeah, super interesting. So even these people were, were working out and stuff like that and their blood pressure was through the roof. So is that, I guess off of that, and you may have hit on this a little bit, but is that mostly just again, from a training perspective, or is this like lifestyle factors that you usually see there? Is it genetics, all the above that usually jack that up a little bit? Yeah, there could be a bit of everything there. And there are some people that have genetic issues where their heart rate's always going to be high, their blood pressure is going to be high. But again, those are outliers. They're not. It's those are the unicorns that you see every once in a while. I think, look, I've been in the industry for 25 years, I may have seen one person that had a true genetic issue that had to take it and the rest of his life. And it still wasn't under control at that point. And I think he was on two to two different medications. So there, some people just don't win the genetic lottery and that's just the way it is, but that makes it even more important for them to take care of this stuff and do the best they can with what they've been given. I think part of it with the coaches is all the coaches we love to train and we tend to train too much. We tend to train way, way too much volume all the time, six days a week, 12 sessions a week, if we can. And it's sometimes, especially the younger guys. And you got to tell them, hey, calm down the nutrition. this is especially prevalent for the men, the young men who think that calories are the way to get bigger. So they start eating and then they plateau. And so they start eating more, they plateau, they eat more. And then by the end of it, their blood pressure stage two hypertension, and they don't look that great. They look like a, they get out of the shower and they look themselves in the mirror and they look like a fucking melted candle. So it's, and then they go crazy and then they starve themselves. Right. And then they just, they basically wipe out everything they've done. So what I tell people, and this is going to sound so bad, if you want to gain weight that quickly, then take steroids, put your big boy panties on and take gear. If you, because gaining muscle is a very slow process. It's decently fast. The first year you could put 12 to 15 pounds of dry muscle, muscular weight, and then it's going to slow down. And you just have to accept that it a long marathon journey of putting on a lot of muscle unless you willing to take performance enhancing drugs which I don have a problem either way somebody does or doesn want to To me it a personal choice Yeah 100 And it funny as you saying this I definitely can relate to that story right I'm a short guy, so I wanted to build muscle, right? I just had always been skinny. And so I think for a while I was probably not eating enough, right? It was all about just eating clean and how that can go for somebody who's 18 to 20, right? You end up not eating enough. But then I was like, okay, I need to eat more. So I did that and I was just gaining weight like crazy. when I got up to 190, which I'm five, seven, I did it in a relatively quick fashion. I was like, I definitely got bigger. And I think I put on some muscle, but I also just went too far on the other end of the extreme there because I was trying to like speed up the process. I was trying to look like these football players that were probably taking some PEDs and stuff like that. So I can definitely relate to that specific story there. We all, we've all done it. And I remember like in, when I was playing high school football, it was like every night before bed, a couple of scoops ice cream, some like wheat or weight gainer, half a gallon of whole milk. You were also training like three hours a day in the Texas heat. So you didn't really get, you didn't really put on a ton of fat, but then you keep doing that when you get out of high school and you're not, you're sitting at a desk in college. Now you're getting real fat really quickly. But I think it was Mike Isertel. I heard him talk about this, where you're just putting on weight for the sake of putting on weight and you're seeing the scale go up, but you're not actually looking better. You're looking worse. And people are commenting about, oh, look how nice you look in a shirt, but then you take a shirt off and you look terrible. So let's, why don't we slow it down a little bit and just accept that if you're putting on 80 to 100 grams of dry muscle weight per week, you're doing really good. And, but if you want to push that up to trying to gain like a half a kilo a week, you're going to end up fat. Then you're going to have to diet it off. You might as well just do a body recomp and just gain enough and try to limit fat gain because then you can go for extended periods of time without having to cut yeah and then most of the time when people take it too far they end up like for men they end up like 24 25 body fat and they go oh shit and then they get hyperactive the opposite direction and they just slash a bunch of calories maybe they do a shit ton of cardio and then they just they peel it off really quickly but at the end of the day they haven't really put on that much muscle so it doesn't make any sense to do it that way and even just on the way down Again, the quicker you go to the more you're going to be risking some muscle loss in that process as well, too, that the patience is key. It can be super frustrating, but it's super key on the way up and on the way down. But yeah, I've definitely changed my thoughts on that. I think the slower the weight gain, I know they, Eric Helms had a new study that came out on weight gain and it wasn't on a lot of people. They talked about, Hey, like this, this, that very small surplus is probably the way to go there. And it's definitely changed how I've wanted to go about gaining weight and stuff like that. So a couple of things for some of these metrics. So you mentioned HRV, but obviously with that, that one can be a little iffy just because each way you take it, it could be a little bit different. It's going to give you a different number and whatnot. Resting heart rate, blood pressure. Is there anything else that you look at for anybody here that's important before you start to ramp things up? It just depends on how crazy they want to get. Obviously, you can run labs every quarter, every half a year. But then you have to have somebody who can interpret the labs because your doctor is not going to be able to interpret them correctly with an athlete, right? And then most trainers have no idea what they're doing when they're interpreting labs, or they've taken a course from another trainer and they're looking at single markers instead of looking at them all together. So that's not a practical thing to do, even though if you know how to read lives correctly, it's a good thing to do. Blood glucose can be a good one, but then it depends on if your client, clients are scared of needles, so they're not going to finger prick themselves and there's a pain involved. then that's another hassle. We look at our objective scores would be resting heart rate and blood pressure, HRV, if you can get it. And if we can keep like in context of what it does and doesn't mean, those are all really good. Obviously weight is definitely a marker, right? Are you gaining too quickly? And then circumference measures are a good one. Body fat measurements can be a good one, but then they can be variable too. It depends on what you use. What I'll use with clients when I'm back home in Brisbane, we have a, we have access to a deck. So that's not too far away, but we almost never put them on that. We have an in-body, but in-body is not that accurate either. But what I like to do is try to take a few different ones. So I'll look at their pictures. I'll look at their height and weight. I'll do a, I have an ultrasound machine that I'll use. I've got my calipers. I have my in-body and I'll do circumference measures, do a Navy body fat test. And then what I'll do is I'll track that over time and see what they all say and based on how their pictures look. And so I'll use that, but I won't really talk to them that much about body fat percentage because it doesn't matter. You either look good or you don't. You either like the way you look, you don't. Your body fat percentage doesn't really matter all that much because you can have people like for me, you can have people with different size fat cells. So depending on what's inside of those fat cells, you can have people that need to be leaner to look as lean as somebody with smaller fat cells. So generally like younger guys have very small fat cells most of the time, so they don't have to be that lean to look lean. Usually the older you get, things start to change and you have to be

a little bit leaner to look the same lean as you did 10, 20 years ago, right? So pictures can be good, but you also have to keep that in context. And then you also have water retention. If people are, I, when I got here, the first thing I did was I went all to, I woke up the next day. I went from looking like I was 12% to looking like I was 20% and it was just water. So two days of sweating, working out and all that. And now I look like I did when I first got here. So you have to keep all this stuff in context because data is good, but data can also drive you absolutely insane if you don't keep a control on it. And then subjective markers are good too. So you'd never want subjective metrics to override objective metrics. You want to pair them together and just look at trends. So how do you feel like you slept? Did you wake up well rested? Are you falling asleep in the middle of the day? Are you falling asleep easily at night? That's a good one. Are you recovering? How's your DOMS? Are you progressing in the weight room? Are you adding another rep? Are you adding a little bit more weight? Looking at where you started a phase versus six weeks later, were you into the phase? Did you gain strength? Did you lose strength? These are all stuff that we look at. So you have to look at them in like a matrix format. Right. Yeah. Any one metric by itself was probably not giving you the full picture, but taking multiple ones. But even within that, each one's going to have potential errors, right? The body fat one's the one that I see a lot of times too, where, okay, I want to get to this percent body fat. And it's, ah, I'm just not a fan of having somebody try to get to a certain body fat percentage. Like you said, the pictures are going to be the way to go there. Do you feel like you look good? Do you look lean? That's the most important part there. And then even with the labs too, like you said, those are good metrics, but we need somebody that understands how to interpret those. If you really want to get a good picture on those. That's right. And the thing with the body fat percentage too, is people are only obsessed about body fat percentage because people talk about body fat percentage. If you never bring that up, they don't give a shit. It's okay. Let's take a picture. Do you like what not yet? Okay. Let's lean out a little bit more. Let's add a little bit more muscle because that's, you're not looking, you're not really looking for a number. You're looking for a look, right? So it's in people don't understand. And even coaches don't understand true body fat percentage. If you haven't, if you haven't been lean enough to have your ass look like a Walnut, you probably have a really bad misunderstanding of what true body fat levels look like at each position. Cause you'll get every trainer says he's 12% and they're like 20% because they're using, because they're using like a Jackson Pollock seven site and they're using crappy calipers and they don't have good technical skill with how they're doing that. So you got to understand, even in a skilled person, body calipers can be off by plus minus four to 6%. So again, it's not a bad thing to have, but you got to keep in mind, there's a lot of variability in it. I, if I'm going to do calipers, what I'm looking at is a sum of a certain number of sites. So I'll look at like 10 sites, 12 sites. I'll do it. I'll add up the numbers. Let's say it's two millimeters. I'm like, okay, if you want to be, you want to be Dick skin lean, that's going to have to be somewhere around like 65 millimeters or less. Right. So our goal is to go from two 50 to, and if we're losing five to 10 millimeters a week, we're pretty happy with that. That's good, consistent. That's good, consistent progress. And to what I like about that too, you mentioned like the, the body fat number, like you said, nobody cares about it, but it's just because people talk about it. It also goes back to, you talk about these subjective measures too. Like, how are you feeling? Like some people, and I'm sure you've seen this. Some people can just maintain a little bit of a lower body fat percentage and feel fine. Other people it's like pulling teeth, right? And it's, is that great for your overall health? So looking at that, but then again, also comparing it to those measurements, like the resting heart rate and blood pressure to make sure you're in a good spot there. I'm sure that probably comes in factors into your decision-making around that as well too. Yeah. A hundred percent. And the thing is, I think a lot of guys are really surprised when I tell them you'll be really at 12 to 15% is probably what you're looking for because it's easy to get to and it's easy to maintain. 10 to 12% can be easy to maintain. It's a little bit harder to get to, takes a little bit more sacrifice. Getting sub 10%, I don't think people understand what that even means. Because the thing is like at sub 10%, you're starting to see, if you look at the lateral aspect of the glute, you're starting to see a little bit of muscle start to pop out there, but you have very little fat. You might have a little bit of FUPA fat underneath your belly button, but getting like under 10% is way leaner than people think. And it's a much larger mission unless you're just naturally skinny. But if you're naturally skinny, your problem probably isn't getting lean. It's trying to put on muscle. That's why God created Diana ball. I love it. Do you see like when somebody does get lean like that, what you were talking about there, obviously we'll see potentially some subjective markers that go down the drain, but do you see like resting heart rate start to climb back up at that point and blood pressure change or is that something that when you're leaner like that it will relatively stay in a good spot there actually when you get leaner all those metrics go down so if you want it if you want to get control over your heart rate and your blood pressure there's a lot of ways of doing it with just your training but if you just simply lose weight we'll say body fat they all they go down like it not uncommon to see people before they go on stage in like the forties for their for their heart rate It not unusual to see them with really like hypotension really low blood pressure It just part of depleting yourself down to that point. Yeah. She still almost be the opposite. It might over-correct and go a little bit further down than what you want there. Yeah. So if you think we, as you get bigger, your heart has to pump more muscle or pump more blood through a lot more tissue. So it has to pump a lot harder and you get to the point where it's becoming, it's getting more difficult for the pump. So it creates a lot of vascular resistance, which then makes the heart grow and get bigger. And so the heart will start beating faster and we'll start pumping harder, which means your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up, you lose all that tissue, you don't have to push so much blood through so much mass, everything goes back down. But that's not to say that you can't you you can still get really muscular and keep your heart rate under check and keep your blood pressure under check. But you have to do the, you can't rush getting up there and you have to try to make sure you keep your aerobic capacity in a good spot. Because what people will do is they'll start bulking and they stop doing all their cardio. Just do minimal effective dose of cardio. Try to just some preventative types of activity like that. And you can keep that under control. I know powerlifters deadlift 300, squat 270, and they've got perfect blood pressure. And then you see the rest of them, the guys who don't take care of the heart rate and don't take care of their blood pressure, they'll be at 140, 150 over 90. It just depends on how you train it. And I was definitely in that camp of, oh man, if I do any cardio, I'm gonna be missing out on gains. But as I learned more about it, it's man, it can really, it can probably, obviously to a point, but adding that in, especially if you haven't done any, could probably amplify your training a little bit as well, too, in your sessions. Yeah, increases recovery, increases your work capacity, helps you, increases sleep quality. it's just don't train for a marathon where you're trying to gain weight but a 5k distance or somewhere there like 30 40 minutes a day if you're feeding those calories back and you're running at a low intensity is not going to in my experience will never affect anything that you're doing but everybody's so scared of cardio they will all want to do steps let's make steps sexy and periodize your steps and that is the most cardio thing you could possibly do you one of the the most aerobic thing you could possibly do is just walking and but the problem is it's a time vampire you're gonna go you're gonna walk 15 000 steps a day so you're gonna go walk for two and a half to three hours a day and you still gotta train you're gonna meal prep you got a job you got a family you got hobbies like you could just you could knock that out in one hour with just doing getting on an elliptical and getting your heart rate up to 140 and just slogging it out watch netflix so you do Do you think that you could get away with like steps if you're this person, like just focusing on steps or do you think you need to get me to minimum threshold there for like your heart rate for it to be more like considered conditioning work? Are you fine with steps? Steps are only conditioning. If somebody is that deconditioned, the steps are conditioned. So look, if you're morbidly obese, steps are conditioning. If you're in reasonable body composition steps, you're just using it to burn calories. That's it. So you might as well just do the cardio and get more adaptation out of it instead of just walking around the block. Because the thing is, walking, it's rate limited. So you can only walk so fast mechanically. So you're either peeking out like walking really ridiculous, like one of those Olympic walkers who are walking fast enough to almost be running, but not quite be running. Or you're just increasing your distance, you know, indefinitely increasing your distance and you don't have the time for that. Yeah. So, yeah, that makes sense. It's like, basically you could just get a little bit more of a stimulus out of it by ramping that up a little bit, but not going too far with it to where you're like doing high intensity type stuff all the time, because you mentioned that's going to obviously impact your recovery and whatnot. Stay in zone two work, stay in zone two work. Just don't go so hard. You feel that hydrogen burn or what people call lactic acid. Just stay under that. You're going to be all right. We have 130 beats per minute. If you're that scared, I do 120, 130 beats per minute, because the thing, as you adapt, you're going to find you're going harder anyways, just because it's going to be harder to get your heart rate up. Right. Yeah. Cause there's some conflicting information out there on the cardio, like what is considered cardio, but again, it makes sense. It's really dependent on the person and where they're coming into. Cause like you said, for some people who's over, who are obese, like for them just moving and walking is going to be that, that conditioning work, but it's all context dependent there on that. Cool. So what about, so again, we have this person who they're coming in and now they know they need to focus on these things before they can really start to ramp up like the body composition performance type stuff. What are you looking at from like a nutrition standpoint with these people? I'm sure it's dependent on the person, but what does that look like? Cause again, somebody is going to want to come in. They're going to want to improve their body comp, improve performance for some people. It's probably going to be, Hey, I need to go straight into a deficit or a surplus. So what is the nutrition going to look like from that standpoint The first thing we have to do is let create a theoretical base So I like using catch McCardle So what I do is I try to make an assumption If I can measure their body fat we say somebody is really heavy Like they really overweight. They got a lot of stored energy on their body, right? That's like the politically correct way of saying they're fat, right? It's going to be hard, but you can take a heightened weight. So like I'm right at six foot tall, I'm sitting at 92 kilos. I know I've got about maybe 83, 84 kilos of lean mass, maybe somewhere between 80 and 84. So I can get a pretty good measurement of my BMR, at least theoretically, just by taking 21.6 times my fat-free mass plus 370. That should give me a rough estimate of BMR. Now, if you don't know, if you can't make an assumption on fat-free mass, you can always use Mifflin St. Jor. If you're really lean, I don't like using that because it'll underfeed you. Mifflin St. Jor will underfeed me by about 350 calories. And I don't want to underfeed myself. I like to eat. So what we'll do is if they're at an average body fat percentage, I'll try to make an assumption based on how well trained they are and their height and weight and how they look, because it doesn't matter if you're 100% on because none of this stuff is 100% anyways, right? So we'll do that. I'll add in about 10% for neat, 10% for thermic effect. And then what I'll do, I set things, I use a lot of technology stuff. So if you have a Garmin, if you have an Oura Ring, if you have an Apple Watch, I'll set that up in the system we use, which is chronometer. And I'll put on there to have like variable calories. And I'll have I'll set a deficit, let's say we set it at 500 500 calorie deficit at first, and then I'll set protein and fat because those don't need to change. Those can be constants, the carbs are usually what's going to be variable. So the more you train, the more carbs you get, the less you train, the less carbs you get, right. So that makes it you want more carbs, cool, train more easy. But what it'll do is it gamifies it. And if somebody is more active, their calories go up, which means carbs go up, but we still maintain that 500 calorie deficit, right? So we'll look at that and see what happens over a couple of weeks. And then if they're not progressing the way we want to, then we might cut 125 calories off, see what it does over a week or two, cut another 125 off. And we'll keep doing that until we see the rate of fat loss or the rate of body mass drop in the way we want to, right? And the same thing with the surplus. But what I'll do is I'll do that. All of that's the same, but I'll put 125 calories surplus and see how they go. If they're not gaining fast enough, I'll do another 125. And we'll keep doing that until it looks like they're gaining too much fat. And then we'll start backing it back off. And over time you, it takes a while, but you find a really good sweet spot for people. But your constant, your number one cost is going to be protein. Because the thing is, if you're looking at even calculating that against fat-free mass, your fat-free mass isn't going to change drastically enough to need to change protein enough. And I like to overfeed protein a little bit. So I might set somebody like 2.5 to 2.8 grams per kilo of protein. So that doesn't actually need to change. So even if they lose weight, it doesn't matter. They're just overfeeding protein. And then the fat too, I'll say, do you like a lot of fatty foods or do you want to keep it fairly lean? So then I'll set the fat based on what they like to eat. And then I'll also run averages. If they're overdoing it. Let's say I set your fat at 65 and you're consistently hitting 80. I'll just adjust it up to 80 and then it'll work itself out with the carbs and the calories at that point. Yeah. So you're going to get their estimate and then you're going to change it based on what their goal is and whatnot. And it is awesome. I use cryometer for my clients and I love all the features it has on there. I think that's a great place to track your nutrition. So let's say, so with that, if you do have somebody who, again, maybe they're like HR resting heart rates a little high blood pressure is a little high are you now i know that obviously dropping weight can definitely help with that so are you still in that specific situation those numbers are off are you still going to put them straight into a deficit at that point are you going to feel it out a little bit to see um where they're at yeah most of the time i'm going to go ahead and put them in a deficit now it may not be a huge deficit but it just depends on what we're doing now if the goal isn't let's say they're already fairly lean and they like the way they look and they just want to get their blood pressure down, we might not set any deficit at all. We just might add in some conditioning work to try to get that down. And then we're going to look at other things too, because you got to look at things like sodium potassium balance as well. So people tend to way over consume sodium and under consumed potassium. So at that point, it's, we don't necessarily need to reduce sodium. We just need to pump potassium up. So it's okay. Let's look at your food choices with, with lots of potassium. So let's look at a lot more plant matter. So Let's a lot more veggies, a lot more fruit. And let's see if that helps. In a lot of cases, that's the one thing that'll drop it down. But if they're eating a lot of prepackaged foods, a lot of precooked foods, it's not uncommon. I've seen people eating 15 to 20 grams of sodium a day. It's like, all right, that definitely needs to come down because nobody needs that much sodium. And you're not going to eat enough potassium to offset that. So let's try to get that down to something reasonable and also pump the potassium up. And then you almost always see their blood pressure drop immediately Yeah So diving a little bit deeper and looking maybe the food choice specifically in terms of how you can that that can help obviously to drop their sodium or drop their blood pressure decrease sodium increase potassium there on that And then I assuming to somebody that wants to gain muscle and they come in high resting heart rate, high blood pressure, you're not going to put them, that person into a surplus. Like with them, you would probably work on all those. And the thing is you don't, this is a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around. When I try to explain to some, you don't actually need a surplus to gain muscle, right? That's one of the biggest myths in our industry. What you need is you need to have your protein set and you can be in a deficit and gain muscle because you're going to make those calories up, body fat. So if you have body fat to spare, you're never really, we can look at this as being, you can be in a deficit on paper. You can be in, let's say you might be in a 500 calorie deficit on paper, but your body's going to make that gap up biologically by utilizing fat and also using stored glycogen. So you're not really, to me, technically, and this is a matter of semantics, right? It's just a thought exercise. But to me, you're not actually in a deficit biologically unless you're starving to death. So if you look at the guys that came out of Minnesota starvation study, you go look at World War II pictures, people coming out of Auschwitz, those are people in an actual deficit, right? But they're starving the death. But if you're in a 500 calorie deficit and you're easily making that back up with your fat stores, you can still put on muscle. I have people put on muscle easily just by keeping their protein high and not training too much, like training just enough with enough tension and get in the, probably the one thing that is the hardest to get people to do is a sleep more. Like that's the key to everything is getting your sleep. Yeah, no, I agree with you a hundred percent. I've talked a lot about like body recomp and like how I feel like a lot of people have more wiggle room for that than they think they do coming into it just because you've been training for five years doesn't mean you can't recomp right like you said sleep like if that's been garbage it's okay you have a lot like you have some low-hanging fruit there to work on and i'm assuming too this probably goes all into it but stress management i'm sure that plays a big role in all this as well too but that that that goes back to what we just said sleep thing the number one getting more sleep understanding if you're beasting things outside of the gym it doesn't make any sense to go to the gym and beast things out but you hear people go oh the gym is my therapy no that could be part of your therapy protocol but if you need therapy you need to go to a fucking therapist right and get that shit sorted out you could have early childhood traumas adult traumas everybody's got shit they're dealing with stuff that's going on in the world with wars and recessions and inflation and uncertainty it's like you have to you have to look at this from a perspective of guarding your thoughts and reorganizing how reactive you are to things because that's what, when I talk to people about this, I try not to get stressed. I understand there's gonna be things out of my control, so I just don't stress out about it. I always know that things will eventually get better and getting stressed out and crying about it or getting mad about it doesn't solve the problem. So you have to, and I know this, some people will say, oh, that's easier said than done. It's just something you gotta practice. Stop being reactive to things and that's part of stress management. If things are, the sky is falling, cool, get an umbrella, get under a tree, but you have to learn being hyperreactive doesn't fix things, right? So if the shit's hitting the fan, if you're a hyperreactive person, I don't want you in the foxhole with me, right? Because you're going to make bad fucking decisions or you're going to get paralyzed. So I think people need to understand how to stay calm under pressure and keep their thoughts under control. And that's probably the biggest advice I can give anybody for managing stress. Yeah. Cause I think a lot of people hear stress management and they think, Oh, okay. Like you said, things are going to happen to you. You can't control that, but it's how you manage, how you react to those and how you manage those. It's going to be key there on that. But yeah, with the training, I see that all the time, oh, training is my therapy or somebody's training three, two times a day, every day. It's good. But I feel like at that point, it's like, it's probably just adding to your stress load versus actually decreasing it at that point, which might not be great. that point, if you're training twice a day as part of your therapy, and it's not part of your program, because it's necessary for some type of adaptation. It's not a therapy thing. It's an addiction at that point. So you're basically self medicating with your workouts. So you don't have to face what's going on in your life. It's the same thing with people who do cocaine, people who like hookers, people who overeat food because they're feeling sad. That has that's a mental issue. That's an emotional issue, a psychological issue. The weight training, it's like retail therapy. You feel down, you go out and you buy yourself a couple of things, you feel really good. And then you're like, oh God, I just spent $2,000 on shit I don't need. Now you feel even worse. So you're never going to overcome that because you're using things to basically as shields. So you don't actually have to have it coming to Jesus talk with yourself and work within. People try to use working out instead of working in. Right. Absolutely. No, I love that working in versus working out. I know we've been on training throughout,

But with kind of the least mode concept here, again, somebody that's maybe not showing great markers here to start. We mentioned the right training. So, again, we've talked a lot about cardio. So doing that's going to be important from a weight training perspective. Is that something that you're also going to back off a little bit as well in this situation? And maybe what does that kind of look like? Yeah, it's all about dose, right? Dose makes the poison. So if somebody is at that point, and people have said this to me in the past, oh, like least mode training is pussy training. It's not pussy training. It's basically looking at it from a perspective of you only have a certain amount of resources. Right now, your resources are not good. So why don't we go in and hit a couple of really hard sets of a few different things and go home? And then if you feel the need to do more than do a lot of ramping warm up sets. But see what is the minimal amount of stimulus you need that you can recover from and just get in, get out and be done with it. and don't stay in the gym for four hours doing bullshit work and bullshit volume that you don't actually need. So it's actually in a lot of cases, the least mode workouts are usually harder than our normal workouts because you're taking things as close to failure as possible. As long as you're not losing technique, right? It's a good time when we do least mode stuff, I tell clients, this is a really good opportunity for you to focus on your technique and don't worry about your load, worry about bar speed and technique and how it feels. In a lot of cases, we'll switch instead of bilateral stuff, we'll switch to a lot of unilateral stuff. So it's basically unilateral stuff. You can still put plenty of attention to the muscle without overdoing it using two muscles, right? Or using two limbs. So it's a good, it's a good opportunity for things like doing structural balance training and doing all the piddly stuff you don't really want to do, like doing your external rotator work, your rhomboid work, that type of stuff. Yeah Cool Yeah No it basically just putting in more quality work but like less like volume like overall essentially there Cool Luke we coming up on an hour and 15 minutes here So I want to be respectful of your time Is there anything that we maybe missed on the lease mode or anything that you maybe want to go over or in fact, we summed that up pretty well? Yeah. I think, look, I think that's, I think we've summed it up pretty well. I, what I like to do, and I want people to think about this, like you could have, you could have periods of time where most of your stuff is lease mode. So if I have a client come in, And we'll look at when we're designing a program, we'll try to design 12 months up front for all of our clients. Right. So we know where they want to end. We know where we'll be getting. So all we need to do is we need to figure out how to work from the back end to the front and say, OK, I look at it as if you're taking a road trip. If you and I were going to take a road trip like you, let's say you're going to fly over to Austin and we're going to drive to L.A. And we but we don't have a car. So we've got to go buy a car and we don't have a lot of money. so we might buy a real jalopy like just a real busted up car it's got three flat tires a cracked windshield check engine light it's probably a good idea to go get that shit taken care of before we try to drive all the way to la or we're going to end up stranded in the desert in new mexico or arizona and then we're going to be real trouble right those first you might have a first couple of phases might be a lot of least moaty stuff which is we can do a lot of cardiovascular activity we can start getting our nutrition in order we can use a lot of unilateral work and structural balance type work to get the car ready to drive. Then we can hammer it on the destination. But at some points, the car may not act right. Like we're driving along and the wheel feels like it's wobbling a little bit and there's a little bit of smoke coming out of the tailpipe. All right, cool. Let's stop, take it to a mechanic, do a couple of weeks of lease mode work. All right, cool. We fixed that. Now we're back on the road. So we can use these as specific phases of training, but we can also use them as like deload periods. When you see your metrics crumble, which they should. If you want good results, you're going to have to make your metrics crumble. That's part of overreaching What you need to do is set your metrics really well so that when they do crumble you notice that they trending the wrong direction catch it before it goes too far get the metrics back up and then you back on the road again And that going to come through proper nutrition proper training, and stress management and all that there. And so looking at where's your data. And also the big thing, I think, especially long-term is to recognize how you feel and then look at the data because you can, I have clients that don't take, I have some clients I've trained for five or six years. We don't take any metrics anymore because they know they wake up in the morning and go, I don't feel right. Then they take their metrics and I go, all right, take your metrics for the next five days. Yeah, I think we're in that stage. Let's go ahead and back off a little bit and switch emphasis. Yeah. Go off the field a little bit more, which is ultimately what we want to try to get to anyways with all this stuff. Awesome, Luke. A ton of great information in here, man. Really appreciate your time. Before I let you go, those are anywhere, anything that's coming up for you that you want to share and then anything anywhere where you want to lead the audience to yeah man if anybody's going to swiss i'll be speaking there next weekend then we've got myself and cass and at n1 we're doing a seminar a week after that doing like problem solving for trainers we're looking at different body parts and different areas and saying okay if there's a problem this is how i solve it this is how cast solves it now let's make a venn diagram and see where what i do what he does matches up so that's going to be a pretty cool and if anybody's going to be at the Olympia. I'll be there speaking on a steroid panel. So do that. And then, yeah. And then there's a silverback summit. I don't know if there's any, any spots left, but there might be. So there's going to be a really cool summit here by one of my best friends and one of my clients. I'm here in Austin, I think in a month or so. And that's going to be a really nice, really cool conference. A lot of stuff on TRT and health and performance and lifestyle and all that. and can be a lot of barbecue and debauchery Is that online or is it only in person I think it only in person but she might I have to ask her She might be recording that for for post but that going to be cool There's nothing like, man, there's nothing better than in person. Cause it's going to be there. Staffording is going to be there. Like there's a lot of, a lot of big boys that are going to be at that one. So if you want to come and hang out with some of these guys, like that's, I'm excited to be hanging out. I haven't seen Brian and I've known each other forever. I haven't seen him in 15 years. So yeah, that'll be good. Awesome. 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Allie, Allie Gilbert. She's the one that runs it. Yeah. Cool. She, she was on the podcast a couple months ago and she hit on the silverback. That's super cool that she does something like that. Yeah. So unfortunately this podcast will probably be out in a couple of weeks, but by the time this comes out, people can look at the silverback there hopefully, and maybe get some tickets there at the last minute. But cool, Luke, appreciate your time, man. I guess where can they find you? MuscleNerds.com, your website or muscle nerds.net yeah muscle nerds.net and then on instagram we i think we've changed muscle nerds underscore education i think as well as don't go to the one that says the muscle nerds we haven't had access to that in seven years but you'll you yeah if they look us up they'll find us if they like uh if they like memes they can go to my personal account but that has nothing to do with muscle nerds if you just like unpolitically correct memes that i that i put up there while i'm taking a shit then yeah go for that i before i have people on the podcast i I always look through Instagram and stuff and see, and I was like, man, there's not really any fitness type stuff here on his personal page. I had it, like you said, go to muscle nerds, which, hey, it's fine. I love it. We got to do other stuff too. So that's my space. That's my space to be away. And man, I, people still don't get this. I tell them all the time. Don't send muscle nerd stuff to my personal account. You want to send me dank memes, knock yourself out, but, but not anything related to the industry. I love it. Cool. Again, Luke, appreciate your time, man. It was a great chat and I look forward to chatting with you again. All right, my man.