Luke's Personal Training and Nutrition Routine

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?