Losing Fat At Different Body Fat Levels

17,334 words · 19 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction and Podcasting Logistics

CHAPTER 02

The Information Age and Nuance in Fitness

Like everybody's trying to learn everything on YouTube and Facebook and it's good. It's great. Like it's the, we're kind of past the information into the over-information age. So it's like, there's so much good information, but people also have to understand there's also so much bad information and so much contradictory information, right? You were telling me before we got all the, like, you see, like, muscle nurse says the same thing a lot of other people say, and we try to be diplomatic and say, hey, this person's right, but also this person they're arguing with, they're also right. They're both right, depending on the situation. And, but you know what? Like, why don't we use both of those things? So we do things a little bit differently. And that's not great for marketing. What marketing what they want you to do is like get people angry get people frothy go argue with people and have a really firm stance Right So it like Republican or Democrat OK who in the middle of that Libertarians. Nobody's nobody's a libertarian. Like they're not going to do anything with it. So we're like the libertarians of the industry. It's very slow to get traction with with everybody else taking hard stances on shit. But I can't I can't do it morally. It's not to me. It's not the right thing to do. And you got to explain yourself the in-depth concept in five seconds too. Otherwise, no one wants to learn. It's too long then at that point. No nuance, no context. And it's crazy. I've had two posts go viral in the how many years we've been on social media. They were never about anything that was good information. One of them was about me crying in a Harry Potter movie because of Tren, overdoing Tren. And the other one was recently I was talking about a booze and lose diet where I had a client who would only consistently lose weight when she was drinking red wine and would stop consistently losing weight when she was drinking red wine. And both of those blew up. But if you if you go online and you give somebody some really good thing that's going to help them, nobody gives a shit. It's crazy. Well, you know, I think with your stuff, too, you kind of just mentioned this. What I like is you, you know, you kind of, in some of your videos, when you explain certain things, it's like you, you know, you do, you see a lot of like semantics, like people get so caught up in like the semantics of things too. And it's like super important to kind of differentiate those. And it's like, people are just kind of like saying the same thing, but they have different phrases for it. So then they think they're talking about something different. So I think that's always an interesting thing as well.

CHAPTER 03

The Importance of Context in Coaching Methods

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because, well, it's like you get people that they already have this preconceived notion of what worked for them must work for everybody. So then they get really like deep into that rabbit hole and nothing else works but what they do. And then later they find out they were right about what they were saying, but they would be more right if they would be open to other methods and other styles of coaching and training. And then they have to walk back what they did or sometimes they don't walk it back. There was a trend a few years ago where people were like, I was wrong about carbs. And they would basically self-flagellate and talk about how they were dumb. And now they like that's not to me, that's not very productive. but it is the right thing to do. Most people would just say stupid shit and just ignore the fact that four years ago you said all this stuff and just kind of pivot your stance like a whole 180 degree. And then everybody that's following you is like, wait a minute, like two years ago you were saying it was all about volume. Now you're saying it's all about like one set to failure. And then two years later, they're back to volume. It's like, bro, just be like Switzerland and just stay in the middle and go in this situation. This is good in this situation. This is good. why don't we just use all of it? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. And one of the topics, you know, we want to talk about today is like kind of, you know, in terms of like losing body fat, like again, where you're at currently in terms of your body fat level is obviously going to change, you know, how we would approach, you know, losing body fat. I mean, the principles are still there, but there are certain nuances that, that, that you would change there. And I think that that's super important to go over that stuff. So, but you know, within the day, man, I'm the same way. I, I'm not good at marketing either, but you know, my thought is hopefully, and you, this obviously has help, you know, work for you. It's, you know, if you put out good stuff, you know, hopefully more people find it. Yeah. Maybe it's a little bit slower, but it sounds like, again, you know, you put out that good information and, and, you know, again, hopefully over time it grows there. So I think one of the, one of the key things there is when you market, try to like mass market, you're going to get a lot of tire kickers and people who aren't ever going to give you any money. They're not going to, they're not going to do, they're not going to pay you for anything because they're just there just for giggles or just to get information. When you don't do that and it's word of mouth and you just simply do good work, you get more people who are serious and actually want to come on for training and are going to stay on for training, not just waste your time for a couple of months and then piss off. Yeah, no, absolutely. You get more like kind of higher quality kind of people lurking around and stuff like that. Yeah, no, absolutely. Since we've chatted in the last year, I mean, any big things on your end that's been going on or anything like that?

CHAPTER 04

Luke's Recent Speaking Engagements and Training Update

Not really. You know, we're just kicking it, man. We're just trucking along, you know, obviously like even still just trying to not really recovering from COVID, but trying to get that same traction that we had. So, you know, reorganization stuff, trying to, trying to get scheduling, like the last year and a half, the biggest thing was my wife is finishing her degree in clinical nutrition. So she has just been like the first few years was really easy for her. and then the last year and a half has just been an absolute beat down. So she, she actually finishes in one week, less than a week, less like six days. And I can't wait because now she can get back into the business and start, you know, really working hard and she won't be stressed out from her school stuff. So yeah, that's, that's going to be a blessing. Yeah, no, that's awesome, man. That's, yeah like you said now it it was easy but now it a lot harder And plus now you get an extra set of hands and help there for the business side of things She the one that runs everything man I don I can manage an ant farm bro I just tell dick jokes and talk about training and nutrition And she the one that like she's the glue that holds everything together without her, nothing would get done. That's awesome, man. Hey, you need that, right? We all need that. You also said you kind of been speaking like any seminars or anything like that, that you've done recently. I think you were at the Silverback recently, right? Yeah. I did Silverback this year. I also spoke on some panels for Olympia, did that as well. Nice. That was a really weird experience. What did you talk about there at Olympia? Oh, we had, it was a panel of experts that came and we had certain topics like nutrition and training for hypertrophy. And we had some guys that came like my buddy, Dave Lee came and talked about TRT and performance enhancing drugs and things like that. And it was cool. It was cool. It was an, it was an experience, man, Vegas. I love Vegas, Man, Olympia is wild. It's a freak show. I was not prepared and it's way too peoply. I don't like crowds. And I was I walked into the convention. I was like, oh, God, there's so many people. Oh, my God. But it was it was cool. You said that was the first time you'd been to the Olympia? Yeah. Well, the first time I'd been to the Olympia, last year I spoke on some panels, but it was in Florida. So it was cool, but it wasn't the same. I actually liked the Florida one because there weren't as many people there. In Vegas, it was, man, it was pandemonium, man. You couldn't even walk through the convention. There were so many people. Yeah. I'm the same way. Too many people like that just kind of makes me nervous. At least that many. So cool. That's awesome. Yeah. And then, and then current training, what are you working on? I think last time we spoke, you were doing kind of more on like kind of power Olympic style training. I don't know if you're still kind of doing that. I'm curious to hear what you've been up to with that.

CHAPTER 05

Learning the Chinese Weightlifting Method

Yeah, I was doing like Olympic weightlifting and just be kicking along with that for a few years. So when I learned how to do weightlifting, I learned kind of that Eastern block, Russian, American hybrid style, where in a lot of cases, if the coach doesn't, I was, I had some decent coaches, but you learn some bad habits and kind of the American way is to try to deadlift the bar to your throat and then pray you get under it. And it got to the point where I could, I could power clean a fairly good deal. You know, I could power clean like three 34 couple, I could rack it, but I could never full squat, clean it, which is not right. If you can, if you can power clean three 30, you should be able to squat clean at least 10% above that. And I, but I couldn't get under the bar because it was all about pulling the bar up and hope you get under it. And I couldn't get under it. So a few years ago, I decided to hire a Chinese weightlifting coach and learn how to do it the Chinese way, which to me is a lot more efficient. You just pull the bar only as high as you need to, and then you get under it really quickly. So I've been spending the last few years trying to learn, like reteach myself how to do that. And I train a lot of people that like to do weightlifting. So I was like, well, if I'm going to coach them to do this, I need to figure out how to do it in the most efficient way possible.

CHAPTER 06

Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) Protocol

And so I did that for four years. And then I, right now I'm kind of in a bodybuilding phase because every, almost every year for my birthday, which is in February, end of February, I'll do a cut and get shredded for that. So I went, well, I'll just use bodybuilding this time just because it's, it's easier to do. And I can focus on lifting and dieting and nothing else. And I'm doing some pretty extreme stuff right now. So I'm doing a protein sparing modified fast for two weeks, which is brutal if you've ever done that. So it's, you basically start, you're starving yourself and you're only eating pretty much protein, like all protein and as little fat and carbs as possible. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of nuance in how you have to design the program because I mean, I'm eating like 14, 1500 calories and I weigh 220, like somewhere around 217, 220. So it's like, you have to look at each piece of what you're designing and say, okay, does this all like match? And I was thinking about that this morning.

CHAPTER 07

Matching Training Volume to Caloric Intake

And I think a good rule of thumb, if somebody is deciding what they're going to do is, okay, are you going, are you looking at building or are you looking at cutting? Because that's the first decision you have to make, because that's going to determine whether you choose your training program versus choose your nutrition first. Because when you look at building, building is heavy on the nutrition, but the stimulus you get from what you do in the gym is a really big factor there. So when you're looking at growing and hypertrophy, for me, it's better to look at your training first, like set your training in motion and then look at your nutrition. But when you're cutting, it's the opposite because cutting is all about the nutrition. So realistically, what you want to do is say, okay, how much am I going to eat? Now I have to make sure that the training program matches what I'm eating because what a lot of people do they write this crazy brutal training program but they won eat for it And then they burn out in a few weeks and they losing weight but they feeling like crap And they it not they can sustain it for months that the amount of months they need to get shredded So it like if I going to eat 14 1500 calories a day, I can't go in six days a week for an hour and a half and train my balls off. I have to go in like this morning I've already trained. And I woke up at four, went to the gym was in and out within 35, 40 minutes. So you have to, you have to look at your available energy. You eat more, you do more, or you do more, you eat more, you eat less, you do less. So that's, I mean, that's part of program design is understanding how those pieces fit. So the program will actually work together, right? It's like if you have a car and something, something breaks on your car, let's say you have a Ford, right? Something breaks. You can't go to the junkyard and grab a Chevy part and throw it on your Ford. It's not going to work. You have to go find another Ford. You have to find that part and get that part. So program design is very similar to that, is that all the parts have to match. So with that then, so you're pretty low calorie right now. And you said, you obviously want the training to match that, right? Like you said, a lot of people will not eat a lot and then they'll try to do a ton of training and that's where they kind of burn themselves into the ground there. So with your training, you said you got in 30, 35 minutes and you're doing more hypertrophy style, what does that kind of look like? What is kind of the ins and outs look like at that right now?

CHAPTER 08

Transitioning from Keto to PSMF

Yeah. So, and I'll, let me clean up a couple other points really quickly. Cause normally if I, I don't put a lot of people through protein spray modified fast, it's just too hard. It's just too hard for people to do. You have to be a bit psychotic to do it, but like I do have two clients doing it right now. One's getting ready for a photo shoot. One's getting ready for summer here. And they're two of the most compliant clients I have. Like if I told these clients to go eat dog shit and that would make them leaner or make them stronger, they'd ask me what breed and they'd go buy that breed. And then they'd ask me, all right, how many grams of dog shit do I eat? And how many times a day? Like they're those, they're like the most beautiful clients ever. But normally what I will do is I'll, I'll put somebody through a ketogenic diet first, like just two or three weeks, get their ketones really high because the benefit of that is that ketosis tends to lower your appetite. And that's the hardest part about fasting, especially protein fasting. If you're just not eating and you're doing a water fast, it's not that bad, but you know how it is like you're not hungry, but when you eat now, you're even hungrier than before you ate. So it, it, it kind of, it kind of screws you because the minute you have like a couple of chicken breasts, all of a sudden you're starving because your brain's like, Ooh, food. I want more of that. And then you have to sit there and suffer. But if you do a ketogenic diet first and get your ketones at a good level, 1.5, 2.5 millimoles, something like that. Then you can just cut all the fat back out and just go to lean proteins. And then you don't think about food, but I didn't have that luxury with myself this time. I went straight into the produce, spread and modify fast. So this is the first time I've ever done that. And it's been, it's brutal. It's brutal. Like the first three days, you just keep thinking about food the fourth, I'm on the fourth day now. So everything's fine. Like I'm not even hungry. So I'm going to have to force myself to eat. But there, there are like, again, those puzzle pieces, those parts have to fit together. So because I did that, I knew I wouldn't be able to train a lot. My normal way of doing it would be to, I'd eat a little bit more than I'm eating now, but then I'd offset that with some extra conditioning or a little bit extra weightlifting. So this is a, the way I'm going to explain it slightly different than how I normally do it. And I just wanted to see if I could just do it with lifting diet and then a small, small amount of conditioning. So

CHAPTER 09

Specific Training Splits During Extreme Deficits

basically day one, you want to, you want to try to get glycogen down as low as possible. You want to try to clear liver glycogen. You want to try to get as flat as possible. So what I'll typically do is we'll do a pretty big workout day one or the night before we start. Okay. So, and that'll be basically full body. We'll hit usually about six sets per body part with 12 to 15 reps, something like that. And because you only have six sets, you really need to work as close proximity to failure as possible. So this is not a time to think about RP or RIR. This is, you go in, hit a couple of warmup sets and just fail between 12 to 15. And what I'll usually do is I'll put people, if they have, if they have the luxury of machines, I will opt for machines usually because, you know, not all of my clients have machines. So this is not always going to be an option, but if you do, you can get on a hammer strength, incline press, you can get on a pec deck and you can go full Monty and you can go and go to complete concentric failure. And you don't have to worry about somebody getting hurt or not being able to push the work as far as you need to do. So we'll, we'll basically do giant sets, full body, knock that out. And then the next few days, basically just steps and or some conditioning. And then the workouts in between that are usually around every fourth or fifth day and sometimes we'll do

CHAPTER 10

Body Fat Categories and Physiological Adaptations

So at that point, I'll go to a smaller deficit and keep rolling, right? So like right now, 50%, 60% deficit. when it and i use it kind of like a jump start yeah and just try to drop like four or five pounds of fat really quick to i'll increase training volume a little bit but i'll also increase food and then i'll cruise on like maybe a five or six hundred calorie deficit which now it'll be if you can get through two weeks of pretty sparing modified fast uh six even a 700 calorie there is nothing nothing you're not even hungry you're like man i could do this all the time but it's it kind of goes back to something i learned from la mcdonald who very contentious personality as everybody knows but the guy's brilliant like he knows his shit he's no bullshit he knows his stuff he he talks about like these categories of dieters and a lot of this produce bearing modified fast stuff i learned from him and marty kendall and a bunch of other guys charles pollocklin who was a big mentor of mine so but i like la has has done a really good job of really systemizing some of this stuff. So your category is going to be based on your body fat level. So because I'm under 15%, you don't want to do a protein, sperm modified fast for a really long time. Like you use it for really short bursts. So typically 11 or 12 days, and then take a couple of days to refeed carbs and then like roll into something that's, that's not as intense with a, with a nutrition, not as intense with a deficit. Gotcha. Yeah. So because that's what I I was kind of wondering, again, were you just kind of using it as a way to jumpstart? And then at some point you were going to increase, and that's obviously what you're doing there. You're going to go back to a more normal deficit here, but just kind of getting a good jumpstart on everything to get started. Because the nice thing about this, I mean, again, this is not something for everybody. This is probably one of the hardest things you could possibly do with your training and nutrition. but if you can get through it and you lose a tremendous amount of body fat really quickly, then you can, you can kind of, you can slow it down. You can take your time, right? So, cause normally what I do is I, I start and January 2nd and I'll go until the 25th of February, which is my birthday. So I give myself a good, like seven and a half, eight weeks, something like that. Right. And this time I wanted to see if I could take it a little bit further. I usually get down to like eight or nine percent. And this time I'm like, well, I'm getting old. Do I still have it within me to get even leaner than that? Like, OK, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is I need to start a little bit earlier. And if I can get a good bit of it off right at the jump start, then I can I can have some fun during Christmas and New Year's. And I can slow it down a little bit because I'll be starting on January 2nd at a significantly leaner position than I usually do. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Start it off quick now. And then you have, you know, obviously Christmas, stuff like that. And then you can slow it down. But you also give yourself more time. So you're looking to get pretty shredded during this. Yeah, I'm going to try to get more shredded than I have in a long time. But like this really extreme difficult, like at this lean level of body fat, very difficult. You have to be like, you have to have a coming to Jesus talk with yourself because you're going to be in some pretty dark places during that. So if you're, if you're under 15%, like a real 15%, not what the bros on line think is 15%, but a real 15%, it's pretty brutal. And it's, it's unnecessary really. If you, because all I'm doing is I'm just speeding up the process by what, four to six weeks. That's all I'm doing. Right. But if you are really overweight it a great diet If you can if you can stay on it even with a lot of the new GPs that have come out like the ozempics and the things like that If you look at some of the literature where they talk about like and you see this in the news where we talk about, oh, ozempic causes like muscle loss. It can, yeah, because it basically makes you not eat. But all the recommendations on how to, on how to overcome that are basically protein sparing, modified fast and low volume weightlifting. Now that's not what they're saying. That's what I'm saying. But I was looking through a bunch of the data the other day because one of my clients wants to take some GLP-1. And they basically say you need to up your protein quite a bit and you need to make sure you're lifting weights, but don't lift weights too much. So that sounds just like a protein sparing modified fast. So you just eat all protein and you train like three days a week with just enough volume to not waste your muscle. You throw a GLP-1, which I'm not doing. I would if I could get my hands on it. I'd try it. Why not? Because I haven't tried that class yet. But it's like it sounds like that would be the perfect trifecta combination for people that wanted to lose a tremendous amount of body fat. If you were 40% body fat and you wanted to rip it off really quick, you could feasibly do that long term if you're that overweight. And then when you get to an average body weight level, you can start to slow it down a little bit. and people would not have a problem losing weight if that was the case. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't understand like, you know, they, and this comes back to what we initially talked about, how like, you know, people say like, oh, you shouldn't lose this quick or again, and they kind of lose, they just don't understand that like where you're at, like the nuance of it is super important. So kind of what you're saying there is like, obviously at higher body fat levels, you know, we can, we can push the weight loss. Like you don't really need to necessarily worry about that, that too much. And people get too caught up and like, oh, you know, metabolic adaptation and stuff like that. When it's like, when you're that high of body fat, it really isn't that important. But as you get leaner, that's something that you, again, you may want to start to pay attention to a little bit more. You probably can't do these extreme weight loss protocols for extended periods of time. Cause then you will potentially, you know, lose muscle and feel like crap in the process. Yeah. Well, you know what I said earlier about walking stuff back. I have had to walk stuff back. I just don't do it publicly because I think it's obnoxious. But if you, if you're in cerebral subscription, or if you come to my courses, you come to live courses, you'll hear me say all the time, look, this is what I used to think this is what I was taught and we were wrong. And then I apologize. Now, let me tell you where this is applicable. But also, let me tell you the opposite side of that as well. So you have a clear picture. But, you know, I used to say, oh, I used to be the same guy. Like you can't you can't put guys under fifteen hundred and women under twelve hundred. You got to feed blah, blah, blah. And it's it's it's not it's not correct. It isn't like it just depends. If you eat really low like that. Yeah. You have to modify a lot of other things you're doing. And yeah, you're going to have an issue with performance and sleep and mood that there are, it's not without negative side effects, which is why a lot of people can't handle it because it's, it's just, it sucks. It's, but you have to look at it like this is a, this is a small piece of time. If I'm looking at a year and this is say four weeks of that year, that's not a lot of time. If I can just push through this, I'm good. And then you can decide to go on something that's a little bit more moderate. But, you know, a few years ago, like around right before COVID and during COVID, a little bit after everybody was talking about reds, relative energy deficiency in sport. And they got in this really big kick that you need to keep feeding people more that everybody's going to get reds if you put them on low calories. And I'm like, wait a minute. No, no, no. This is relative energy deficiency for sport. These are people who are training like 21 hours a week and eating 1200 calories. Your client who's massively overweight kind of goes through the motions three days a week at the gym. It doesn't really, they exercise, they don't actually train that fat people don't get reds. Sorry. They have, they have ample amounts of stored energy on their body. And if you look at the Minnesota starvation study, and if you look at, there was another study where they had a guy that was three, I think it's 375 pounds and he went 360 something days with zero food. He basically had a multivitamin mineral in water and it was in a nutrition award. It was underseen by doctors and he lost all the weight and he kept it off. Like technically speaking, if you have that much food that's already on your body that you haven't, it's like food from the past, right? Food that if you have body fat, that is food from the past that for whatever reason you couldn't deal with at the time, you're not going to starve to death as long as you have all the cofactors you need to run your biochemistry and you stay hydrated, you're fine. Now, you shouldn't do that unless you're under doctor supervision. However, this notion that you can't feed people low-calorie diets, they're going to lose muscle. So what? It's not healthy. Neither is being obese. So you pick your poison. You're either obese and dying or you shred it down and you do an unhealthy long unsustainable diet for a while to get your body weight and your fat level to a healthy position And then you learn how to eat normally again. Well, and I'm sure even in that process, because of the fact that, you know, we have plenty of energy on our bodies, as long as, you know, we're doing some of these things we're talking about, Hey, you're lifting at least a little bit, right. You're, you're eating protein. I mean, you really, you know, maybe you lose a little bit of muscle, but I mean, you really realistically shouldn't lose that much anyways, at that point, right. With based on wherever right. Well, well, you will, you will, if you're really obese, you will. And, but, but there's a, there's a very good reason for this. And there's also a reason why it's not a big deal. People who are significantly overweight already have an unnatural, a naturally higher level of lean body mass anyways, from carrying all the weight around. Okay. So when, if you lose that, if you look at the statistics, a lot of people who are really like morbidly obese have 25% increased lean body mass or increased muscle tissue, whatever you want to call it, because something has to support all that muscle. Now, when they get to the point where they can't produce enough muscle to overcome that, now you get people who are bedridden or they have to sit in those little scooters and things like that. And we're talking people who are like six, 700 pounds. But if you get a guy who's 400 pounds, there's a good chance that he has basically the lean body mass of a guy on steroids, but not from the steroids, just from carrying around like 50% more weight than his body needs to be carrying. So even if you lose some of that, it's not that big of a deal because it shouldn't be there anyways, because it's only there because something has to fight gravity when you stand up. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah. So, I mean, that's something that I've probably been wrong on in the past too, where I'm like, well, you know, these people probably don't have as much muscle as they think, but from what it sounds like, you know, maybe they do have a little bit more because of the fact that you just, I mean, you're carrying all that weight around and that's resistance. Let me get my, I always have my calculator. It's my favorite thing. Let's say you get a guy who's 450 pounds, right? Now let's say that 70% body fat. Yeah, that's 350. That's 315 pounds, right? So that means 30% that for, what did I say? 315 divided by 0.7 times 0.3. I mean, he's got a, he's got a pretty decent amount of muscle on him. Like he, even if you lose some of that, it's not like he's going to have sarcopenia and brittle bones. And you know, his bones are probably, if you put them in a DEXA scan, probably bones are better than every, anybody else you see, because again, something has to hold that weight up as it fights gravity. So, I mean, I think this is kind of a good segue into this. So like, I mean, this is something too, that I've learned from you is like kind of the adaptations at both, both ends of the body fat spectrum, right? Again, people kind of think it's like, again, same principles still apply from, you know, losing body fat, but you know, and we may have hit on this a little bit, but what are some of the differences as you kind of like lose body fat in terms of how you would potentially go about like, like dropping that body fat? Like looking through the different categories, right? Yep. Yeah. So, and again, I always love to give credit where I learn stuff. I got this from Lon McDonald. I don't know if this is his proprietary thing. I don't know if he got this out of research or who he got it from. I don't know, but I'd still, that's who I learned from. So I'm going to also say, give him the credit, even though he called me a donkey ass once and called me a steroid freak monkey and then banned me on Facebook. But I don't care. I don't care. You can call me whatever you want. If you have good information, we're still good. I don't give a shit. Like I'm a Xenual. Like I'm from back. Nothing offends me. You can say anything you want about me. I don't give a, don't talk about my dogs and my wife or my car. I'll fuck you up. But talk about me. I don't give a shit. So, but

CHAPTER 11

Mitochondrial Function and Fat Oxidation

so you lay these categories out where you have three categories. So category three would be like the really big people, the big, the really gravitationally challenged people. So the people in the middle are going to be more of your average types of body fat percentages. and then, you know, all the way to where they're starting to get obese, all the way down where we're starting to get lean. And then you have the really lean people. So what we reckon is that each category, your physiology is going to be a little bit different. Okay. So if you look at people who are really lean, like you and me, like we're probably have really good functioning mitochondria. We can oxidize nutrients really well. You know, you're probably just like me. Like as long as we stick to just a good clean diet and calories, we don't put on any fat and we look ripped all the time, right? Once you get super shredded or once you get lean, or if you're genetically, your genetics are set up for that, like you won the genetic lottery, it's easier for you to not gain weight. So yeah, people are really good oxidizers. And that could be again, genetics, it could be the function, it could be nature versus nurture, right? Nature, meaning that you're genetically set up that way, nurture. You got that way because you like me and you trained for the last 35 years of your life and you into nutrition and you keep shit clean most of the time like good oxidizers The problem with people who are really lean is their bodies don want to get rid of the fat right Because as you get leaner your brain goes wait a minute I don like this Like we're losing this stored energy and we come from hunter gatherers. There's no inherent benefit to being 3% body fat when you're hunting, gathering on the Serengeti, right? So like your body's going to get resistant at some point. So that's why when you look at bodybuilders, they take things like clenbuterol, albuterol, they take things like that, these beta agonists that pretty much influence the fat cells to release their fat because they get to a point where it gets more and more difficult to get that last little bit of fat off. They can oxidize the fat if they can get it to the mitochondria. They have a problem getting it from fat cells to muscle cells or fat cells to mitochondria. Now, when you go on the other end of that spectrum, when you have really overweight people, they have no problem getting the fat out of the fat cells. They have a problem oxidizing it. And this is why you'll see really high blood fats in people, really high triglycerides that it has nowhere to go until they make new, new fat cells because a fat cell can only get to a certain size before it ruptures. So as it starts to grow in size, the body responds by pushing that back out in the bloodstream so it can it can basically save the cell okay but the problem is it's in the bloodstream it has nowhere to go now because if it goes to the muscle cell you can't really turn it into heat or or energy in any great degree so then the the muscle cell goes well i'll just i'll store it here or i'll push it back in the bloodstream we'll store it somewhere else like on your liver or in your veins so we'll get ectopic lipid storage. We'll put it in your eyes. We'll put it in your kidneys. We'll put it everywhere else because we have to get rid of it somehow, right? Because if we think about what that is, it's basically energy. And anything can be toxic if it's at a certain level. If I drink enough water really quickly, it could give me a heart attack. It can kill you, right? If I get too much pure oxygen, it can kill you. If you have too much energy in your bloodstream, it can kill you. So when you think about a diabetic, like my cousin had type two diabetes, had no idea. Actually, yeah, he had. Yeah, he didn't have type. He had type two, but it had gotten to the point where it was almost like having type one, but it wasn't an autoimmune disease. It was basically what I call lifestyle diabetes, which is type two diabetes. He was really overweight. He never checked his blood sugar. He had no idea he was on a walk and he passed out and woke up in the hospital and his blood sugars were something like 800, like crazy. He almost died. And so a lot of people don't know like that, that signifying that you have way, way too much blood sugar in your bloodstream, which doesn't really have anything to do with the sugar. It has to do with toxic levels of energy in the bloodstream. That could be sugar. That could be ketones. That could be fat. Just some things will kill you faster than others. Like sugar will, you have a massive increase in blood sugar that will kill you a lot faster than having too much fat in the bloodstream. Fat, too much fat in the bloodstream kills you really slowly. Blood sugar can kill you immediately if it gets way too low or way too high. And just for anybody who's listening to this that doesn't know like normal blood sugar levels. So if you look at American Freedom Units, you should have somewhere between 70 and 100. The optimal range based on the literature is around 84 to 86, right? And when you eat, that's going to jump up to say 100, 110, 120, 130. Once it gets past 140, that's a key indicator that you are pre-diabetic or possibly diabetic type two, which I think they should stop calling type two diabetes, diabetes, because type one and type two are two completely different diseases. So it creates a lot of confusion with people who don't know this stuff. But if you look at something like, and let me change that into our units now that I'm overseas and we use metrics. So anybody who's outside of America uses metric system, you're going to look at somewhere around 70, somewhere around like 3.9 to about 5.5, 5.6 is considered pretty normal. Once you get up to around like 7.7, 7.8, now you're getting in the diabetes zone. right? So if you think about that, my cousin, he was sitting at 800. He was eight over eight times the normal amount of blood sugar, which can put you in a diabetic coma and kill you immediately. Yeah. That's, that's freaking insane. That's yeah. So, so it sounds like, again, it's just kind of energy overload and that energy really has like no, nowhere to go. Essentially. Can I go use the bathroom real quick? Dude. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Sorry. So when you're at these kinds of higher bodies, I mean, what, what would you say are like, maybe the biggest differences? I know one thing that, you know, you've kind of mentioned too, is like, you know, for these types of people, it's like, we really want to try to, again, this is something that's gotten poo-pooed, I feel like in the industry of like, oh, cardio, you don't want to do it to lose body fat. But from my understanding, you know,

CHAPTER 12

The Role of Cardio in Fat Loss

Well, OK, so and again, there's so many different ways you can look at this. Do you need cardio to lose weight? No. A lot of people say it's a very inefficient way of losing weight because you don't burn that many calories when you train. And I'm like, well, it depends what you're doing. and it depends on the other things, the way you've orchestrated the rest of your strategy. At the end of the day, a lot of people who are really overweight, they don't do anything. They're fairly sedentary. And a lot of them are gonna have a hard time managing their appetite. So if they could manage their appetite, all of these new GLP drugs would not exist. Like that's basically what they're doing. Not all of them are doing that, but the main premise of that category of drug is to kill your hunger so that you don't eat. Okay, what does that sound like? A big calorie deficit. Cool. And a lot of output and not that much input. So I would look at it from a, I'm always looking at it from a mechanistic side as well. If you do, if we look at those category three people and we come to an understanding that they probably don't have good functioning mitochondria and we could make that better, what's the easiest way to increase mitochondrial content and and increase the performance of how the mitochondria function is aerobic training so it's like okay even if they're not burning a lot of calories and they do aerobics which is false which is false somebody doing a good decent clip of cardio for an hour especially if they're overweight they could be burning off 600 700 calories you go do jujitsu jujitsu an hour you could burn off 900 to 1200 calories in an hour if you're just constantly doing jujitsu, right? So I think it's a bit, it's fallacious to say that the cardio is not going to help and that you don't need to do it. Now, it's not a very time efficient way of doing things because yes, you're going to have to spend some time walking and doing cardio and doing, depending on how out of shape you are and depending on how overweight you are, you have to find the activity you can actually even do. So let's say you have somebody who's significantly overweight and their knees are hurting all the time from carrying that weight. Going out jogging is probably not a good idea. And I would say jogging for most people is not a good idea because they won't spend time learning how to run properly. It would be like you would never go into the gym and put 400 pounds on the bar for the first time you've ever bench press. You would learn how to bench press first and you'd build to that. But for some reason, people don't look at running in the same manner. They just go out and start running. And I used to because I lived in Austin, Texas for a long time. And it's a big it's place big for running. So you go out to there's a river. It's called a lake, but it's really a river that goes through the middle of Austin. And it's they call it Lady Bird Lake. Now, I will never call it that. It's Town Lake to me because that's what it was before they changed the name. But there's a huge running trails all around, around the river lake thingy. And I used to go out and watch people run and you could tell there was almost nobody, nobody they could run properly. And they're just limping along. You can tell they're not, they're not doing well. They're not loving this. It's like, then why are you doing it? So it's like, if you can't, you don't know how to run correctly, or you're too overweight or your knees hurt or your back hurts, go get on an elliptical, go get on an airdyne, Go get on a bike, do something non-impact that just lets you go as hard as you can comfortably go and within the constraints of your limits. But that's going to be massively beneficial, especially combined with, say, a lower carbohydrate or lower energy intake diet to increasing how well your mitochondria learn how to oxidize, which means that when that fat gets to the cell, gets in the mitochondria, you can actually do something with it and you can get it to come off really quickly. But we'll say they are right that it is all diet. Like you can't, I think, I think what people get confused on is they go, well, I'm going to eat and I'm just going to do training and the training will offset the food. That's only true if you don't eat those extra calories back. You can train, you can use training as your deficit if you have the time and the recovery and the capability to do that. So that's usually how I get lean. So if I know that my TDEE is around 3,200 with exercise, and if I eat 2,600 calories, now you can look at that and say, well, you're actually not using training as your deficit. You're using an actual deficit from nutrition. Then I could go, yeah, but let's flip that back around. Let say I decided to eat 2 but then I did 3 calories of work So now I actually exercising for the deficit So in that situation both people are correct Just depends on which side of the fence you're looking at it from, right? Because if I look at TDEE without exercise, mine's going to be around. If I get just a normal amount of steps, say 7,000, 8,000 steps a day, and I'm eating a good mixed diet, my thermic effect is okay. I'm going to burn off around 2,400 calories. The only reason I need to eat 3,200 is because I'm training five to seven hours a week. So now tell me that training is not creating the deficit. It is creating the deficit because if I remove that, I would no longer be in the deficit. Do you find that like that works better in certain situations or just in general for really anybody, if they can exercise more, you know, you obviously are able to eat a little bit more and still create that deficit. I think that would be, it would be time management and goal specific, right? I like to eat. So if I want to eat more, if I want to eat 3,200 calories a day, I'm going to have to train for that. So if I, if I, let's say one day I woke up and you're like, man, I just really don't feel like eating. Okay. I would, I would just go and I would train a couple of times a week and get my steps in and my little bit of cardio and I would just eat less. But if you're like me and you like to eat, then it's like, all right, well, in order to, I've got to, I have to earn those calories. So in order to be able to eat that much or diet on a higher amount of calories, those calories have to be put somewhere. Right. So but you go through you go through phases like there are times where I'm sitting, I'm chained to this desk or I'm traveling. I just don't have a lot of time to train. If I know that, then diet becomes the main the main operator. But if I'm at home and I can train a lot and I love to train and if you do love to train like cool training now is realistically a big part of that. that deficit because it's a big part of calories out and you just have to match, make sure that your nutrition is set up correctly so that you do stay in a deficit. But a lot of people that in this, I remember back in the eighties and nineties, this was the kind of the thing people would eat whatever they wanted to. And then they go to aerobics class and they, well, I burned all that off. I'm like, no, you either equalized it or you're still on a surplus. And like in the early stages of me becoming a trainer, I remember my mentor Charles would say this, he'd call it the chunky aerobics instructor syndrome. And it was true because all of these aerobics instructors who were teaching, say, four hours a class a day, they would eat whatever the fuck they wanted to, and none of them looked good. The only people that looked good were people that were teaching spin classes, and that's because they were competitive cyclists, so they kept their nutrition well because they were competing in their cycling and triathlons. So there was a massive difference between the people who would just get up there and do Zumba and then go eat a pizza because they danced around for an hour versus the guys who were cycling or like, I'm going to eat for my sport. And that's going to alter my body composition a very different way. And the other people like, well, I earned that pizza and that beer, the different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. Right. Like you said, it's, if you're not, you know, yes, we want to exercise and you can't exercise to, to, you know, help create that deficit. But like, if you're not like moderating that, it's like, that can easily get out of hand. And now it's like, you said, you're either offsetting it or you're eating in a surplus, which again, depending on if you're not tracking things and you're just eating whatever, I mean, it's super easy to do that and you get out of a, out of maintenance and into a surplus if you're not careful with it. And there's pros and cons of everything, right? So if you look at, well, if I keep doing more and more training, I can eat more, but I'm also building up a lot of fatigue and I also have to recover from all of that work. So you can't, you can't endlessly add more work and think, and think that's gonna, that's gonna fix things. But then again, it's like, if you, if you're not going to eat any food, you also can't do much work. So you have to pick your poison. I'm either, I'm either hungry all the time, but I don't have to train that much or I can eat more food, but fuck man, I'm tired from training. I feel like, you know, with all this, you know, I don't know if this is something that you feel like you've seen in the, in this kind of industry, but you kind of get that, like people scared of doing too much exercise, but really what it comes down to is like, obviously like poor programming and stuff, but just people have like, they don't, they don't do the stress management thing. They, they, they sleep terribly. And then they also try to pair it with like terrible nutrition. And then it's like, Oh, you gotta be worried about exercising too much. But I feel like if you can get those things nailed down, I mean, I feel like you, you're, you're a lot of sky's the limit almost in a way from now. Yeah, it really is. It really is.

CHAPTER 13

Training vs. Exercising Mindsets

And the thing is too, if you're looking at just fat loss, if you just want fat loss, you really don't have to train that much. You want to be active. You want to, you want to hit bare basic minimum standards, but you're going to have to be really diligent on your diet. Now, if you're like me and you, and you have goals, like performance goals, like you'll probably agree with me here. You and I don't exercise. We train. And gym pop people go I don understand because we both at the gym I like yeah but watch the way I work out versus the way you work out There a difference And I walk in with a plan I got a plan set in place for the next 12 months You don know what the fuck you doing tomorrow Like there a big difference. You don't, you either train or you exercise and either way is fine. Like I tell people, like I don't try, I don't coach people who, who exercise everybody. I've trained, they train, they go in, they know what is expected. There is a direct goal. There's a direct outcome that we're looking for. And the program is designed to get to that goal. And I think if more normal people, normal being like gen pop, if they would set hard and fast goals, write them down and then work with a coach who knew how to get them there and took the training and the dining more seriously, they'd see far better results because a lot of people, I own a gym that's like one of the most gym pop of all gyms you've ever seen. Like most people are at the gym to make themselves feel better so they can eat pizza and beer on the weekends. Right. They're not there to train. We have very few people in my gym, a hundred and something members. Very few of them say I'm training today. Like I'm here because I know I need to do this. Right. So you have to handle those those programs a little bit differently. And the expectations and the outcomes are far different. yeah yeah totally it's like you you know you see a lot of people they just go and like they don't ever really change and again it's probably just from the fact that they're like you said they're exercising they don't really have that that game plan of what they're doing everything's just kind of random and it's like really at that point it's you know kind of a up to you if you know you want to keep doing that or like you said any sort of exercise is going to be perfect but if you want to you know be more efficient with your time which who doesn't you know again like switch that focus to more like training versus just kind of exercising i think everything everything has some benefit right so you know used to i used to be one of those real pompous arrogant assholes that would would laugh at people for doing body combat and zumba and what being a vegan and i was like you know what they could be sitting on their ass eating fucking ding dongs and drinking bottles of bourbon on the week all week like they're doing something and that's better than nothing and now i've kind of gotten frothy about that like a friend of mine did a post the other day and And it was in, it's such a weird, it is, and I'm going to agree with him here. It's a weird and ludicrous fucking activity. But it started in Finland and now it's all over Scandinavia. They have, it started like 20 years ago and they have competitions of it. And people have these, you know, those toy horses that you'd have when you were a kid and you played like a cowboy and they do those and they, they gallop around the fucking arena and jump over things. and you'll hear, you'll see coaches that will go, Oh, so stupid. They should go lift weights. I'm like, okay, here's the thing. They don't want to lift weights. That's not an option for them. You and I know that lifting weights would be better and doing, doing actual like program conditioning and technical work, but they were never going to do that. So it's either they, they race around and pretend like they're Cowboys and Indians and doing, doing toy horse dressage. they either do that or they're doing nothing so we shouldn't be poo-pooing that we should be say hey you be the best fake horse rider in the world you go girl you go boy you do whatever you fucking want because at least they're out there doing something well and then it really just comes down to like okay if they then if they start complaining about not seeing the results they want then we can have that conversation of like all right let's be a little bit more efficient with with what we're doing because at that point they're like hey how do i get better at this you know what's going to make that better if you lifted weights once or twice a week and so that that silly thing that they're doing, that silly activity could be a gateway drug to them actually starting to do like some, some targeted training and doing some weightlifting. Speaking of weight training in general, I feel like this is something too, that I've kind of like, again, I, I think it's super important. I mean, like, again, like I'm, I'm all about, Hey, like body composition, we need to build muscle. We need a weight train, but this is something that I feel like, you know, when I first got into training and it was like, everyone's just kind of really poo pooed on the cardio side of things. And, you know, again, I, do you feel like people maybe overemphasize like the, the, the training side of things and the kind of person that comes to mind is kind of, I feel like it's more so guys, right. That like go to the gym, they lift heavy. And then like, they, again, they're just like higher body fat levels. And they just, do you feel like those types of people don't do enough cardio? Uh,

CHAPTER 14

Objective Metrics for Cardiovascular Health

yeah. And I, and I think everything, everything has a time and a place, right? So if you are overweight and you're resting heart rates really high and your sleep's really shit and your HRV is low and you're inflamed and you know, you're not feeling good and you have no capacity to actually no work capacity. You actually, you do a lift and it takes you 10 minutes to recover and you can't actually get more than three things done in a workout. It's probably a good time to do some cardio, but I always use, you can use objective and subjective metrics for this, like objective being, I have quantifiable data. I can attribute either a range or a number or a value and the subject of being more about touchy feely shit. Right. So like if you say I don feel good I feel out of shape I feel fatigued Okay that all subjective But and that really important But let put some objective markers too Oh you have stage two hypertension Your resting heart rate is like 95. Your sleep score is really shit. Your HRV is in the dump. Oh, look at your labs. Your blood fats, trigs are all crap. It's probably time to do some cardio. But I think everybody should do a minimal amount of cardio, just like I think everybody should do a minimal amount of not resistance, training. That's the thing that I like to do, but that all you need to do is apply tension to the muscle. So if you like to do calisthenics, if you like to do movement stuff, crawl around an animal flow, do it. If you like to do like pull-ups at the park, do it. The, the, the only thing the brain knows about this is something is applying tension to the muscles. The joints are opening and closing and the muscle is lengthening and shortening. Your brain doesn't know a barbell curl or your brain doesn't understand a pull-up versus a pull-down. Like, yes, the motor sequencing is different, but your brain, your brain's not going, hey, are we doing this or that today? All it knows is, hey, my lats, my biceps, all this stuff has some type of external load being applied to this. Okay, now I need to get stronger to overcome this because this has kind of been a regular thing week to week. So I think people should find the activities that they're going to be able to be consistent with and enjoy long-term. So it's not like, oh, I'm doing a 12-week program. No, this is what you're doing for the rest of your life. So cardio, yeah, should be part of that. So it's like steps, that's kind of the gateway drug there. But I think steps are being way too overblown now. I think everybody should do probably at least, even the government guidelines for this is pretty good, actually. Like, you know, if I would say if you're getting 150 minutes, some type of mixed cardio between aerobic and maybe some little moderate intensity stuff, you're pretty good. And that's not that big of a deal. You could do 20 minutes of cardio a day and then every other day, switch it up one day, kind of take your heart rate up around 75, 80 for 20 minutes. The next day, do 20 minutes at like 120, 130, mixing some walking there. You got a pretty solid program and it's easy and no muss, no fuss. And it only takes you 20 minutes a day. Right. Yeah. That, that was one thing that you mentioned too. Like, you know, the steps are great and like, you want to stay active, but, but that's like you said, kind of getting a little bit overblown. I feel like at this point in terms of where now people are just doing like crazy amounts of steps and then maybe missing out on saying, doing some of that stuff that kind of gets that heart rate up a little bit more.

CHAPTER 15

Progressive Overload in Aerobic Training

Well, it's like, once you get, once you get really good at steps, where do you go from there? It's like, okay. So you can only walk so fast before you have to jog mechanically. you can, you can look like a race walker in the Olympics, but at some point you're going to adapt to that. So the next logical thing is I'm going to have to kick up the speed to a jog, or I'm going to have to do an elliptical, but you're going to have to always, once you've made those adaptations, you have to provide a bigger stimulus, slightly bigger. So it's, I either have to add more load or I have to do more volume. Okay. So if you look at steps, if you're walking, say 12,000 steps a day, which is a lot. If you set a desk like I do all day, there are days I get 1,700 steps. There's no way. There's no such thing as steps. I'm going to have to do dedicated exercise, whether that's steps or cardio or whatever I'm going to do. But to make up that 6,000, 7,000 steps that I'm missing, I'm going to have to do something because you might not have time to go out and walk for an hour and a half to get your 9,000 steps. So let's say you're hitting a certain threshold of steps and you've made that a habit and you're like, there's no way I can get more steps. It's going to be impossible. Well, your coach tells you to go to 15,000 steps. Like that's another 30 minutes of walking. That's not going to happen. Like, okay, what's the next logical step? Well, I can't do more volume. Maybe I bring the volume down a little bit and I do my steps a little bit harder. Well, what are harder steps? Jogging, elliptical, adding some resistance, going a little bit faster. Basically, it's basically a factor of speed. Speed and cardio creates intensity. If you're on a machine or you add a weighted vest or you add some type of external device, now you can leverage load as well. But in every gym I've ever been to on the face of the planet, there's always three old bro dudes that train with each other Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And you'll watch them. Monday is always International Chest and Biceps Day. So you'll watch them. Day one that you see them, maybe they're bench pressing 225 pounds. pounds for a few reps. You go and you look at them again, three years later, they're still benching 225 for three. They haven't gotten any better. They haven't gotten any stronger. The bodies look the same. Well, what's the problem? Well, they never did more reps. They never added more weight. So of course they're going to stay there because there's nothing to create more adaptation. And the same thing can be said about cardio. If you do 60 minutes of cardio every day, and you never raise the incline, you never go faster. You never add

CHAPTER 16

Cardio for Longevity and Injury Prevention

Right now, nothing because my calories are so low. Well, I probably will today. I was really busy last few days recording tons of content for Cerebro subscription, but today I think I'm going to, but it'll be minimal. It'll be, I'll go for a walk and I may get on, I have an elliptical at home. I'll probably get on that or I'll get on my assault runner and put a movie on and I'll just, I'll just kick back and I'll, maybe I'll study a little bit while I do my cardio. I'll read one of my books, something like that. So, but when I'm not dieting this hard, then mine is always going to be based on my metrics. So like my resting heart rate is like 47, 48 right now. So I could slog along and keep doing more just standard aerobic work, but like, what's the point? Like I'm already at a really good heart rate, HRV, blood pressure. So I'll probably opt to do a little bit more hit work or a little bit more anaerobic work because the most important thing is going to be the aerobic. Like that is a fundamental truth. Everybody needs good aerobic capacity if they care about anti-aging longevity and also not just not just living to an old age, but actually living to an old age. Those are two different things, but it's like living when you're older or just waiting to die when you're older, which one, which is your choice. So it's like aerobic work is the one that's going to keep your heart healthy. It's going to keep your cardiovascular system healthy. It's going to keep your brain healthy. It's going to keep your IQ up because aerobics increase BDNF and increase brain plasticity. It's going to keep your kid. It's going to keep everything healthier. Now, there is a point where, all right, you've kind of maximized that aerobic. So what's the next step? Well, you have the anaerobic side too. Now, is it that important to have good anaerobic capacity? That can be debatable. I would say it is because as you get older too, you start to have sarcopenia muscle wasting. And what is the number one killer of the elderly? Falling, right? Yeah, falling. So it's like weightlifting can be very protective against that because the stronger you are, the more you can fight against gravity. You're not likely to fall. But you also have to realize that sometimes you fall because you stepped off a curb and you misstepped. Well, that is going to be a movement that is much faster than what you're going to get out of weights. So how can I get around that? Well, I can do plyometric stuff like jump ropes, ankle hops, small box jumps. I can go jog. I can do some type of weight-bearing dynamic movement like walking lunges, stationary lunges, just stuff where I'm actually having to decelerate quickly against the ground, which is something you're not going to get from weights unless you're doing Olympic weightlifting, which I highly recommend for older people to not, not full lifts, but doing like clean pull, snatch, pull, push, press things that are easy to learn and easy to implement that aren't that are technical, but not so technical that it's not outside of people's grasp. But that's a really good scalable way to learn how to beef up reactive force, deceleration strength, eccentric strength, especially at high speed. So that if you, if you're the, if you're older, like, let's say, I mean, again, I'm, I'm thinking I'm almost 47. So I have to think about where I'm going to be at 65, 75, 85. And so let's say I take up tennis at 75. I don't want to be going for a ball and misstep, fall down, break my hip and die in the hospital. So weight training is going to be helpful to prevent that, but it's not going to be complete to help that. There are other things we could add to that of being able to step out and stop my body weight and being able to change direction and not fall down. So cardio doesn't have to be just about your cardiovascular system. It doesn't have to be about speed. It can also be about longevity, anti-aging and, and preventing accidents when you get older. So it sounds like, again, you want to kind of build that good base, but then from there, you know, you can start to incorporate maybe some like kind of higher intensity type stuff. Once you kind of get that good base of cardio in. Yeah. And the higher intensity stuff could be all that. The thing, the nice thing about the anaerobic stuff, you have a, you have a lot more selection of what you can do. Like aerobic stuff is just standard repetitive cyclic stuff Like running is a cyclic movement Cycling is cyclic elliptical is cyclic upper body ergometer everything is a cyclic motion all concentric cyclic motions when you look at anaerobic now we can be we can have a lot of fun because we can hop side to side we can use a slide board we can jump on and off a small box we can jump rope we can do we can go to the park and do like amateur parkour and just but just try to be safe like jumping and running and you know tumbling and that you have a lot more options when it comes to anaerobic stuff. And so it can be a lot more fun for people, but to me, it's never going to be as important as building that aerobic base. And we, we, we know this, this is like, this is not negotiable. It's not debatable. You, you realistically, if you don't want to have a stroke or a heart attack, you don't want to have dementia. You need to do at least a minimal, minimal effective dose of aerobic work every weight. So for you, I mean, obviously, you know, right now you're, you know, dieting on low calories, so you're not doing this, but outside of this, do you still, even though you're resting heart rates, you know, you said like 47, 48, are you still doing a little bit of aerobic base just to kind of keep that or can you can, okay. A hundred percent. But like what I'll probably do is something that's kind of mixed, right? Because the thing with the anaerobic it's because it's high intensity, you don't, you can't do a ton of it. You can do a ton of aerobic work. And if you stay, if you play by the rules, it's not like you have to recover from that. Like no one has to recover from zone one, zone two training, right? Unless you just, you do 10 hours of it, but no one's going to do that unless you're trying to do tour de France, but, or you're an ultra marathoner, but with the anaerobic stuff, it is higher, higher intensity. You can't do a ton of it. So for me, what would be a nice thing is if I went for a walk, like we live in a really nice, quiet area north of Brisbane. I can I've got a 10 minute walk down to the beach and that walk is up a big hill so I can have I can get my heart rate up there. And then I can walk all the way around the beach and there's tons of picnic tables and places to go as basketball courts. I could take my basketball and just I could walk or slow jog at the basketball court, shoot some hoops. I could go and I could jump run like jog and jump onto a bench and jump off of it. You know, there's all kinds of stuff I could do where I could be doing an aerobic session, but throw in some plyometrics, throw in some push ups, throw in some pull ups, just easy, basic stuff to turn it into more of an anaerobic. Yeah, for me, it's like I'll do a couple days of like kind of that more basic kind of like bike, you know, 45 minutes-ish. And then I play hockey once a week, and I kind of count that as my anaerobic, higher intensity type training. It's fun, right? It's a little bit different. So, yeah. Just have fun with it. Yeah. I'm glad you said hockey because I just, I've got, I was a rollerblader back in the 90s, man. Aggressive, aggressive skater. So, a few years ago, I bought some aggressive skates because I have a skate park down the road. And I went over there and I went, wow, this doesn't feel the same when I fall down anymore. So I think this kind of sucks. So I went and bought some cruisers that actually they're taller wheels. So they're faster. They're for city going. So I might, I might actually get on my skates and go out for a nice skate today. That'd be actually be good. Dude, I actually play. So I actually play roller hockey. And so, so I use the roller blaze for that. And yeah, it's, it's fun to, that's a good way to do some cardio. I think go out and hit the blaze. I think that's especially if it's nice out there, which for you guys, it's the summer now. So 100 percent. I tell this to clients, especially women who want to grow booties. Like if you if you go on Google and you image search hockey, but you're going to get all these pictures of professional hockey guys in jeans with these massive asses. I'm telling you, fuck the hip thrust, man. Go get yourself some rollerblades and do that as your cardio and your ass will be fucking enormous. and you'll be able to train the hips in a way that most people need is a bit more abduction and a bit more external rotation. And you can link that up with something that's fun and just go cruise up and down the street on your rollerblades. I do find that, you know, like if I play like a few more games than normal, like my upper like glutes, man, will just be fricking sore as hell from, from, from doing that. And it's kind of funny, this is just off topic, but for me, I've always had like bigger, like outside of my quads versus like, And it kind of makes sense now that you're saying that in terms of how you skate and stuff like that. So muscle grows based on stress lines. So where you apply stress as it's going from joint to joint is where you're going to have a lot of the opportunity to grow to grow that muscle. So if you if you look at guys who skate a lot, you're going to see really big vastus lateralis because that's basically pulling, helping to connect your hip to your knee. And when you skate out and you go into like a 45, more like a 45 degree abduction and then externally rotate, that muscle is in a really good line to now create that tension. So you get a ton of tension through that outside sweep. Yeah super interesting stuff

CHAPTER 17

The Reality of Body Recomposition

Real quick just kind of last topic I want to bring up We don have to spend too much time on it at all I just am curious I know you kind of brought this up I was watching one of your Cerebo videos Body recomp You know a lot of people say you can like build muscle at a deficit or like build muscle maintenance. What are your kind of like thoughts around that? I think they're full of shit. Yeah, I think it feels good. Now, again, I love debating. I love arguments. I love having arguments and arguing like a civil debate. and the a good person who can debate really well is someone who can basically debate both sides and i try that's what so i always look at that like they're i have friends that i don't agree with how they're teaching coaching but i can agree with what they're saying in the situation that it's presented in but i can also argue against other situations so now they are right in that you can't build a lot of muscle fast while you're trying to diet. Like you have two opposing forces. But the thing is, if you're doing a recomp, you're not looking to do it quickly. So if you're eating to recomp, you're losing fat. You're just going to be losing it slowly, and you're going to be putting on muscle very slowly. It is more efficient to pick your poison. So if you want to get lean, go full Monty getting lean if you want to get lean quickly. So if you were if you were at above average body fat level and you really wanted to be below average body fat level, like you really wanted to be, you know, not say dick skin lean, but fairly lean. Like, let's say if you're a woman and you're sitting at 30 percent, right, that's a pretty that's actually pretty average body fat percentage, like 30 to 34 percent. And then their coach tells them they're 26. I'm like, no, you're not, honey. He's he's he's lost about eight to 10 percent somewhere in there. and don't worry about the number. It doesn't change who you are as a person. It's just the fact that you just have this stored food on your body we got to get rid of. And then you're probably going to, the look you want is probably around 24 to 26%. So you look at that, you go, well, you could grow into that by doing it slowly, but it's going to be way more cost-effective and a better return on your investment faster if you just pull off the 8% to 10%, and then we do a long, slow, lean bulk. And then, you know, so you could do what you can do with, like, fat loss. Fat loss runs really quickly. The difference being, like, anabolic processes work really slowly. It's how we're designed.

CHAPTER 18

Sleep as the Foundation of Progress

Catabolic processes work really quickly, and that's why muscle growth takes a long time. Like for, let's say a guy, the first year you're going to put on, if you're, if you're good the whole year and you don't miss your training sessions and you're diligent about your sleep, which is probably the most important factor out of everything we're talking about. If you don't sleep, you are fucking up your programming. You can take all the drugs you want. You can do all the training sessions. You can eat perfect. If you are not sleeping, man, you are really shortchanging yourself. Like if you feel like I was thinking about this this morning to all clients of mine who don't sleep. They're like, what do you take for your brain? You remember everything. And I'm like, no, no, no, I don't take anything. I take nicotine and caffeine for my ADD because it's hard for me to get my drugs, my ADD medication here. I don't take any nootropics. I don't take anything for my brain in that way because what I found was I'm trying to out supplement a sleep issue. So sleep is very important. Now, if you look at going back to what we're talking about, It's like it's going to be much faster to go from, say, 32% body fat to 24. Like, what is that? That's for 12, 12%, right? You could realistically do that if you're pushing it 12 weeks. Or you could take 24 weeks. But if you try to recomp that, it's going to take you 48 weeks. It's going to take you significantly longer, twice as long or longer than that than if you just did a dedicated shred. Now, once you get that dedicated shred, now you have a decision to make. Like, if you want to get stronger and you do want to put on some shape and some size, we could do a lean bulk or you could just bulk and then shred that fat off again. What I would say is if you're looking at fat loss, but you want to grow into it, just focus on the fat loss, get it over with because it's really quick. Then if you want to get size, now do your do your recomp at this point, because you don't put on muscle quickly anyways, unless you take drugs and even those are limited. So if you think a male is going to put around six kilos or around like 13 pounds of actual dry lean muscle tissue in his first year training, then that's going to slow down every year. So if we look at the realistic possibilities, you're putting on maybe 80 to 120 grams of actual dry muscle lean muscle every week So if you look at that if let just say it a hundred 100 grams times 52 weeks is 5 kilos 5 kilos is around 11 11 and a half pounds And then the next year it's going to drop by 20, 25 percent and every year is going to drop. So these people who say you can't recon, you're not going to gain a lot of muscle unless you eat in a massive surplus. You don't gain a lot of muscle quickly anyway. So it's a moot point. You're getting bigger. but as obi-wan said to the stormtroopers these are not the droids you're looking for this is not the bulk you're looking for you're gonna have to diet that off later so it's probably going to take the same amount of time of bulking up and shredding that off is if you just slowly bulked up and you never had to shred again you know this makes more sense that way and it's healthier right well and we've all been there we've all done that that built uh that block that we put on too much weight i know i've been there and um definitely yeah i i agree i think at this point it just makes sense to to do it really slowly. And, you know, like you said, it's just going to, it's not going to be healthy that way if you do it too quickly and everything like that. And then again, it all comes back to the body fat percentage too, where you at with that. I think that's going to play a huge role in that as well too. You know, you got to ask yourself, do you want to have to diet it off later? If you're okay and want to diet it off later, okay, go for it. Like whenever I put on fat, it's not because I'm bulking to get bigger. It's because I'm being an asshole with my nutrition. I just want to eat shit food. Like when I go to Texas, I gain weight because I've got Texas beer, I got barbecue. I got Tex-Mex. So I diet before I go. And now I'm dieting after I got back from Texas. So, but, and just like a final point on that, there's literature that just came out over the last one or two years that say conclusively calories, eating more calories is not the way like, yeah, you, you have to have enough calories to support what you're doing. And if you want to grow, you need probably a little bit more than that, but you don't need a lot more. You need like five, maybe 10% more than your TDEE. So if my TDEE is 3,200 and I don't change anything other than my nutrition, I realistically don't need more than about 3,500 to grow new muscle. But the problem is, especially for men, they want to grow faster than that. So they get on 5,000 calories and they go, I'm not growing. I'm like, yeah, no, you are. You're getting fat and you're not digesting all that food anyways. If you want to, if you want to grow faster, that's why God invented Diana ball. Take Diana ball, put on your big boy pants and stick a needle in your glute. I love it. Yep. I mean, that's, I mean, that's really the only way to speed things up. So

CHAPTER 19

Texas Barbecue and Closing Remarks

speaking of Texas barbecue, I think it was actually the football game race. Maybe it was last night, man. They were showing some, I don't know what place it was, but they were showing that I was like, man, that fricking looks good. Just loading up with the meat and mac and cheese maybe and everything did it look freaking awesome so i have a friend i was talking to him a couple of days ago he he's from new york buffalo new york and he moved to tennessee and he's like man he used to live in austin and i trained him for a long time and he's going to come back on for for coaching again it's been i'm super excited because he's you know you just have you have clients that he's he's a good personal friend but besides that like you just have clients that were fucking stellar this is one of the one of the few guys i had at one point i had a double body weight bench press he was doing single arm chin-ups like just an absolute animal so i'm super excited but he goes man i miss texas barbecue he goes i've not been able to have any barbecue like that since i left and i go bro you're in tennessee like you're in prime pork country you need to go eat some pork barbecue and he goes it's not the same it's not the same as brisket it's not the same as as smoked sausage. He's like, it's good, but it's not, it's not Texas. Like, okay, fair enough. But they do do pork way better than we do. Yeah. I know it makes me, I want to go to Texas now just to, just to try some of that stuff. I might have to cook a, I might have to cook a, cook a brisket this weekend. You can already tell the diet fatigue's kicking in for you, man. Yeah. Well, I will be, I'll be switching phasing out the ketogenic. So that I'm getting my brisket. Perfect. Well, Luke, really appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on. A ton of great information here. I love just kind of hearing your thought process behind everything. I'll let you go. Is there anywhere where you want to lead the audience to? Yeah. All right. They want to go our websites, muscle nerds.net. If you want to go to Instagram, again, we don't expect a whole lot. We're shit on social, but if you follow us, we appreciate it. We're working on it. 2025, that'll be the year has always been speeding it up a little bit, but that's a muscle nerds underscore education. You can follow me. I just got in trouble and got restricted on Instagram and Facebook for some stupid shit. So I, if you like like really bad, politically incorrect memes and you don't get easily offended, you can go to my, my Instagram, Luke Lehman. Uh, but don't send me any, don't question, no questions. Don't ask me about muscle nerds. That is my, that's where I get away to just talk about memes and post memes. It has nothing to do with muscle nerds. So muscle nerds is the professional side. The other, the, the personal counts a little bit more personal, I guess, essentially would be the way to put it. One of Zoe's friends was they were laughing about the

between what i post and muscle nerds post and then also my coach max like the drastic difference between what i post and he post it's like you go on mine it's all like titties dick fuck jokes shit you know all that it's like really bad stuff like stuff against republicans stuff against democrats like no nobody is safe on my account and then you go to muscle nerds it's all like sciencey shit and and then you go to max and stuff it's all really wholesome stuff you get every and it's always all books. You get everything you want. You get every combination of whatever you want there. A hundred percent. Cool, man. Well, we really appreciate your time. We'll obviously get you back on again in the future, but yep. We'll talk to you soon. Anytime.

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# Losing Fat At Different Body Fat Levels

**Channel:** Jeffrey Hoehn - Mind Muscle Connection Podcast
**Published:** 2024-12-27
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=on5Vot0yvIo

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Mind Muscle Connection podcast. Today I have a very special guest back on for the second time. He was actually on episode 357 about a year ago now at this point, Luke Lehmann. So if you aren't familiar with him, first go check out that episode. It was a great episode. But if you aren't familiar with him, he's a coach and educator. He's a founder of Muscle Nerds and he has over 20 years of experience in this space. So Luke, welcome back on the podcast. Good to see you, Jeff. It's been a while. What episode are we at now? So I'm on like 530-ish probably at this point. So I just do like, I do two solo episodes a week and then I do one guest a week. So it's like, it adds up, you know, pretty quickly. So it's not like, you know, I'm just, you know, just talking about a ton of fitness stuff, you know, and stuff like that. But, but just trying to stay consistent with it. So yeah, right on, right on. We've been talking about doing it ourselves and I have no idea what I'm doing, man. I just spent like a week trying to create, like, you see the blue behind me. I've created like this green screen thing. I'm trying to figure out it's all ghetto. I just went to the store, bought like bed sheets and learned how to do it in OBS and it's, it's coming along. Okay. But man, it's a, it's a whole other, a whole other process to learn. It is. Yep. Well, you do a good job of, of all the, as you mentioned, actually Luke. Yeah, man. I mean, the podcasting I feel like is, is pretty simple once you, once you get it down and everything like that. Plus you have a ton of good content and a ton of good information to share anyway. So that'd be awesome. If you do, would you plan on doing like solo episodes or like guests or, yeah i think i think like what you're doing like doing some solo ones and having a guest on every few episodes and that way you know talk about cerebral subscription and the training and some of the other stuff we're doing and things like that we're terrible at marketing we've we've never you gotta you gotta keep in mind like i'll be 47 in february so i come from uh from an era where there was no such thing as marketing and we we didn't have social media like you basically someone would call you out of the blue and go, Hey, so-and-so told me you're the dude for this thing that you do. Can I train with you? And I'm like, yeah. So we didn't have training software. We were using word, like typing stuff up on word. And there were times at the start where I was sending people their programs on a fax machine and they were sending it back on a fax machine. So it's like everything I've done has all been word of mouth. And so social media for us old people were like, what, what in tarnation is this? I feel like my parents, when I tried to get them they helped me with algebra in high school and they're like, I don't know how to do this shit. That's hilarious. That's the first time I heard the, the, the fax machine. That's a, that's a different kind of online training right there than, than what we're used to nowadays. Oh yeah. Like I was like 2005, 2006, I was online training. There was only a handful of us. It wasn't like it is now where everybody's a trainer now, you know, and you basically would get people, you go to a seminar and you would meet people and they go, Hey, I like the way you look, how you train. Oh, you're a power lifter, you're a bodybuilder, you do all this stuff. I want to do this competition. We train me and that's how you built your business. And then working forums. It's like before there were Facebook forums, unless we had PHP forums and you know, you get on like bodybuilding.com forums or whatever. And you would talk to people and go, Hey, you sound like, you know what you're doing. Can I pay you to train me? And you're like, Oh yeah, sure. And that's, you built it up over years doing that. Yeah. I do often hear a lot about, you know, people that got into the fitness industry, like you said, or, you know, early 2000s, it is a lot of like forums or everybody's talking about the forums. I never was on those. I think I came into it in like mid, like early 2010s. And that was like, you know, bodybuilding.com was kind of like the big thing then, you know, and so I'm assuming probably somewhat similar and stuff like that there. Yeah. Like it's, it's funny because when we started Muscle Nerds, I went, look, I don't want to do this on Facebook. I don't want to have a forum, a Facebook forum. I want to have like an old school PHP forum where you can have, okay, you're in the nutrition class. Here's that. And you could section it out. and you could give people access only to stuff that they are qualified to be in or that they've paid for, but no one would use it. They're like, no, Facebook is so much easier. I'm on Facebook all day. And I'm like, that's why your business is shit. And while your training is shit, you're spending too much time on Facebook and not enough time in a textbook. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Time actually like learning more and learning the ins and outs of things. Yep. Like everybody's trying to learn everything on YouTube and Facebook and it's good. It's great. Like it's the, we're kind of past the information into the over-information age. So it's like, there's so much good information, but people also have to understand there's also so much bad information and so much contradictory information, right? You were telling me before we got all the, like, you see, like, muscle nurse says the same thing a lot of other people say, and we try to be diplomatic and say, hey, this person's right, but also this person they're arguing with, they're also right. They're both right, depending on the situation. And, but you know what? Like, why don't we use both of those things? So we do things a little bit differently. And that's not great for marketing. What marketing what they want you to do is like get people angry get people frothy go argue with people and have a really firm stance Right So it like Republican or Democrat OK who in the middle of that Libertarians. Nobody's nobody's a libertarian. Like they're not going to do anything with it. So we're like the libertarians of the industry. It's very slow to get traction with with everybody else taking hard stances on shit. But I can't I can't do it morally. It's not to me. It's not the right thing to do. And you got to explain yourself the in-depth concept in five seconds too. Otherwise, no one wants to learn. It's too long then at that point. No nuance, no context. And it's crazy. I've had two posts go viral in the how many years we've been on social media. They were never about anything that was good information. One of them was about me crying in a Harry Potter movie because of Tren, overdoing Tren. And the other one was recently I was talking about a booze and lose diet where I had a client who would only consistently lose weight when she was drinking red wine and would stop consistently losing weight when she was drinking red wine. And both of those blew up. But if you if you go online and you give somebody some really good thing that's going to help them, nobody gives a shit. It's crazy. Well, you know, I think with your stuff, too, you kind of just mentioned this. What I like is you, you know, you kind of, in some of your videos, when you explain certain things, it's like you, you know, you do, you see a lot of like semantics, like people get so caught up in like the semantics of things too. And it's like super important to kind of differentiate those. And it's like, people are just kind of like saying the same thing, but they have different phrases for it. So then they think they're talking about something different. So I think that's always an interesting thing as well. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because, well, it's like you get people that they already have this preconceived notion of what worked for them must work for everybody. So then they get really like deep into that rabbit hole and nothing else works but what they do. And then later they find out they were right about what they were saying, but they would be more right if they would be open to other methods and other styles of coaching and training. And then they have to walk back what they did or sometimes they don't walk it back. There was a trend a few years ago where people were like, I was wrong about carbs. And they would basically self-flagellate and talk about how they were dumb. And now they like that's not to me, that's not very productive. but it is the right thing to do. Most people would just say stupid shit and just ignore the fact that four years ago you said all this stuff and just kind of pivot your stance like a whole 180 degree. And then everybody that's following you is like, wait a minute, like two years ago you were saying it was all about volume. Now you're saying it's all about like one set to failure. And then two years later, they're back to volume. It's like, bro, just be like Switzerland and just stay in the middle and go in this situation. This is good in this situation. This is good. why don't we just use all of it? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. And one of the topics, you know, we want to talk about today is like kind of, you know, in terms of like losing body fat, like again, where you're at currently in terms of your body fat level is obviously going to change, you know, how we would approach, you know, losing body fat. I mean, the principles are still there, but there are certain nuances that, that, that you would change there. And I think that that's super important to go over that stuff. So, but you know, within the day, man, I'm the same way. I, I'm not good at marketing either, but you know, my thought is hopefully, and you, this obviously has help, you know, work for you. It's, you know, if you put out good stuff, you know, hopefully more people find it. Yeah. Maybe it's a little bit slower, but it sounds like, again, you know, you put out that good information and, and, you know, again, hopefully over time it grows there. So I think one of the, one of the key things there is when you market, try to like mass market, you're going to get a lot of tire kickers and people who aren't ever going to give you any money. They're not going to, they're not going to do, they're not going to pay you for anything because they're just there just for giggles or just to get information. When you don't do that and it's word of mouth and you just simply do good work, you get more people who are serious and actually want to come on for training and are going to stay on for training, not just waste your time for a couple of months and then piss off. Yeah, no, absolutely. You get more like kind of higher quality kind of people lurking around and stuff like that. Yeah, no, absolutely. Since we've chatted in the last year, I mean, any big things on your end that's been going on or anything like that? Not really. You know, we're just kicking it, man. We're just trucking along, you know, obviously like even still just trying to not really recovering from COVID, but trying to get that same traction that we had. So, you know, reorganization stuff, trying to, trying to get scheduling, like the last year and a half, the biggest thing was my wife is finishing her degree in clinical nutrition. So she has just been like the first few years was really easy for her. and then the last year and a half has just been an absolute beat down. So she, she actually finishes in one week, less than a week, less like six days. And I can't wait because now she can get back into the business and start, you know, really working hard and she won't be stressed out from her school stuff. So yeah, that's, that's going to be a blessing. Yeah, no, that's awesome, man. That's, yeah like you said now it it was easy but now it a lot harder And plus now you get an extra set of hands and help there for the business side of things She the one that runs everything man I don I can manage an ant farm bro I just tell dick jokes and talk about training and nutrition And she the one that like she's the glue that holds everything together without her, nothing would get done. That's awesome, man. Hey, you need that, right? We all need that. You also said you kind of been speaking like any seminars or anything like that, that you've done recently. I think you were at the Silverback recently, right? Yeah. I did Silverback this year. I also spoke on some panels for Olympia, did that as well. Nice. That was a really weird experience. What did you talk about there at Olympia? Oh, we had, it was a panel of experts that came and we had certain topics like nutrition and training for hypertrophy. And we had some guys that came like my buddy, Dave Lee came and talked about TRT and performance enhancing drugs and things like that. And it was cool. It was cool. It was an, it was an experience, man, Vegas. I love Vegas, Man, Olympia is wild. It's a freak show. I was not prepared and it's way too peoply. I don't like crowds. And I was I walked into the convention. I was like, oh, God, there's so many people. Oh, my God. But it was it was cool. You said that was the first time you'd been to the Olympia? Yeah. Well, the first time I'd been to the Olympia, last year I spoke on some panels, but it was in Florida. So it was cool, but it wasn't the same. I actually liked the Florida one because there weren't as many people there. In Vegas, it was, man, it was pandemonium, man. You couldn't even walk through the convention. There were so many people. Yeah. I'm the same way. Too many people like that just kind of makes me nervous. At least that many. So cool. That's awesome. Yeah. And then, and then current training, what are you working on? I think last time we spoke, you were doing kind of more on like kind of power Olympic style training. I don't know if you're still kind of doing that. I'm curious to hear what you've been up to with that. Yeah, I was doing like Olympic weightlifting and just be kicking along with that for a few years. So when I learned how to do weightlifting, I learned kind of that Eastern block, Russian, American hybrid style, where in a lot of cases, if the coach doesn't, I was, I had some decent coaches, but you learn some bad habits and kind of the American way is to try to deadlift the bar to your throat and then pray you get under it. And it got to the point where I could, I could power clean a fairly good deal. You know, I could power clean like three 34 couple, I could rack it, but I could never full squat, clean it, which is not right. If you can, if you can power clean three 30, you should be able to squat clean at least 10% above that. And I, but I couldn't get under the bar because it was all about pulling the bar up and hope you get under it. And I couldn't get under it. So a few years ago, I decided to hire a Chinese weightlifting coach and learn how to do it the Chinese way, which to me is a lot more efficient. You just pull the bar only as high as you need to, and then you get under it really quickly. So I've been spending the last few years trying to learn, like reteach myself how to do that. And I train a lot of people that like to do weightlifting. So I was like, well, if I'm going to coach them to do this, I need to figure out how to do it in the most efficient way possible. And so I did that for four years. And then I, right now I'm kind of in a bodybuilding phase because every, almost every year for my birthday, which is in February, end of February, I'll do a cut and get shredded for that. So I went, well, I'll just use bodybuilding this time just because it's, it's easier to do. And I can focus on lifting and dieting and nothing else. And I'm doing some pretty extreme stuff right now. So I'm doing a protein sparing modified fast for two weeks, which is brutal if you've ever done that. So it's, you basically start, you're starving yourself and you're only eating pretty much protein, like all protein and as little fat and carbs as possible. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of nuance in how you have to design the program because I mean, I'm eating like 14, 1500 calories and I weigh 220, like somewhere around 217, 220. So it's like, you have to look at each piece of what you're designing and say, okay, does this all like match? And I was thinking about that this morning. And I think a good rule of thumb, if somebody is deciding what they're going to do is, okay, are you going, are you looking at building or are you looking at cutting? Because that's the first decision you have to make, because that's going to determine whether you choose your training program versus choose your nutrition first. Because when you look at building, building is heavy on the nutrition, but the stimulus you get from what you do in the gym is a really big factor there. So when you're looking at growing and hypertrophy, for me, it's better to look at your training first, like set your training in motion and then look at your nutrition. But when you're cutting, it's the opposite because cutting is all about the nutrition. So realistically, what you want to do is say, okay, how much am I going to eat? Now I have to make sure that the training program matches what I'm eating because what a lot of people do they write this crazy brutal training program but they won eat for it And then they burn out in a few weeks and they losing weight but they feeling like crap And they it not they can sustain it for months that the amount of months they need to get shredded So it like if I going to eat 14 1500 calories a day, I can't go in six days a week for an hour and a half and train my balls off. I have to go in like this morning I've already trained. And I woke up at four, went to the gym was in and out within 35, 40 minutes. So you have to, you have to look at your available energy. You eat more, you do more, or you do more, you eat more, you eat less, you do less. So that's, I mean, that's part of program design is understanding how those pieces fit. So the program will actually work together, right? It's like if you have a car and something, something breaks on your car, let's say you have a Ford, right? Something breaks. You can't go to the junkyard and grab a Chevy part and throw it on your Ford. It's not going to work. You have to go find another Ford. You have to find that part and get that part. So program design is very similar to that, is that all the parts have to match. So with that then, so you're pretty low calorie right now. And you said, you obviously want the training to match that, right? Like you said, a lot of people will not eat a lot and then they'll try to do a ton of training and that's where they kind of burn themselves into the ground there. So with your training, you said you got in 30, 35 minutes and you're doing more hypertrophy style, what does that kind of look like? What is kind of the ins and outs look like at that right now? Yeah. So, and I'll, let me clean up a couple other points really quickly. Cause normally if I, I don't put a lot of people through protein spray modified fast, it's just too hard. It's just too hard for people to do. You have to be a bit psychotic to do it, but like I do have two clients doing it right now. One's getting ready for a photo shoot. One's getting ready for summer here. And they're two of the most compliant clients I have. Like if I told these clients to go eat dog shit and that would make them leaner or make them stronger, they'd ask me what breed and they'd go buy that breed. And then they'd ask me, all right, how many grams of dog shit do I eat? And how many times a day? Like they're those, they're like the most beautiful clients ever. But normally what I will do is I'll, I'll put somebody through a ketogenic diet first, like just two or three weeks, get their ketones really high because the benefit of that is that ketosis tends to lower your appetite. And that's the hardest part about fasting, especially protein fasting. If you're just not eating and you're doing a water fast, it's not that bad, but you know how it is like you're not hungry, but when you eat now, you're even hungrier than before you ate. So it, it, it kind of, it kind of screws you because the minute you have like a couple of chicken breasts, all of a sudden you're starving because your brain's like, Ooh, food. I want more of that. And then you have to sit there and suffer. But if you do a ketogenic diet first and get your ketones at a good level, 1.5, 2.5 millimoles, something like that. Then you can just cut all the fat back out and just go to lean proteins. And then you don't think about food, but I didn't have that luxury with myself this time. I went straight into the produce, spread and modify fast. So this is the first time I've ever done that. And it's been, it's brutal. It's brutal. Like the first three days, you just keep thinking about food the fourth, I'm on the fourth day now. So everything's fine. Like I'm not even hungry. So I'm going to have to force myself to eat. But there, there are like, again, those puzzle pieces, those parts have to fit together. So because I did that, I knew I wouldn't be able to train a lot. My normal way of doing it would be to, I'd eat a little bit more than I'm eating now, but then I'd offset that with some extra conditioning or a little bit extra weightlifting. So this is a, the way I'm going to explain it slightly different than how I normally do it. And I just wanted to see if I could just do it with lifting diet and then a small, small amount of conditioning. So basically day one, you want to, you want to try to get glycogen down as low as possible. You want to try to clear liver glycogen. You want to try to get as flat as possible. So what I'll typically do is we'll do a pretty big workout day one or the night before we start. Okay. So, and that'll be basically full body. We'll hit usually about six sets per body part with 12 to 15 reps, something like that. And because you only have six sets, you really need to work as close proximity to failure as possible. So this is not a time to think about RP or RIR. This is, you go in, hit a couple of warmup sets and just fail between 12 to 15. And what I'll usually do is I'll put people, if they have, if they have the luxury of machines, I will opt for machines usually because, you know, not all of my clients have machines. So this is not always going to be an option, but if you do, you can get on a hammer strength, incline press, you can get on a pec deck and you can go full Monty and you can go and go to complete concentric failure. And you don't have to worry about somebody getting hurt or not being able to push the work as far as you need to do. So we'll, we'll basically do giant sets, full body, knock that out. And then the next few days, basically just steps and or some conditioning. And then the workouts in between that are usually around every fourth or fifth day and sometimes we'll do

full body if they don't have a lot of time. What I'm doing is actually doing like a push-pull legs program. So I go in, I hit just minimal of what I need for that day, and then I go home, and then it's a few more days of cardio. Then we'll do a high-tension workout before the carb load, and then we'll do our carb load. So today it was go in, do three sets of some type of chest movement, another three sets of a chest movement, three sets of lateral delts, and then three or four sets of triceps done. Go home. Tomorrow it'll be three or four sets of lats, three or four sets of back, maybe three sets of biceps, rear delt, go home. And then the last day again will be like six sets of quads, six sets of hamstrings and calves abs done. In and out really quick. I didn't even break a sweat and it's hot in Queensland. So somewhere there now. Yeah, I mean, you kind of, so basically again, I mean, and you've kind of, I've heard you say this a lot, like with hypertrophy, you just kind of want to go in, kind of get the work, you just kind of, Just get the work done essentially when it comes to hypertrophy. With that, it kind of sounds like what you do there, get it done fairly quickly and everything like that. As far as the protein, so how long are you – you said you're doing this for a couple weeks, right? Yeah. Okay. And then from there, do you stick to that or do you just kind of increase your – what is that going to look like after a couple weeks? So at that point, I'll go to a smaller deficit and keep rolling, right? So like right now, 50%, 60% deficit. when it and i use it kind of like a jump start yeah and just try to drop like four or five pounds of fat really quick to i'll increase training volume a little bit but i'll also increase food and then i'll cruise on like maybe a five or six hundred calorie deficit which now it'll be if you can get through two weeks of pretty sparing modified fast uh six even a 700 calorie there is nothing nothing you're not even hungry you're like man i could do this all the time but it's it kind of goes back to something i learned from la mcdonald who very contentious personality as everybody knows but the guy's brilliant like he knows his shit he's no bullshit he knows his stuff he he talks about like these categories of dieters and a lot of this produce bearing modified fast stuff i learned from him and marty kendall and a bunch of other guys charles pollocklin who was a big mentor of mine so but i like la has has done a really good job of really systemizing some of this stuff. So your category is going to be based on your body fat level. So because I'm under 15%, you don't want to do a protein, sperm modified fast for a really long time. Like you use it for really short bursts. So typically 11 or 12 days, and then take a couple of days to refeed carbs and then like roll into something that's, that's not as intense with a, with a nutrition, not as intense with a deficit. Gotcha. Yeah. So because that's what I I was kind of wondering, again, were you just kind of using it as a way to jumpstart? And then at some point you were going to increase, and that's obviously what you're doing there. You're going to go back to a more normal deficit here, but just kind of getting a good jumpstart on everything to get started. Because the nice thing about this, I mean, again, this is not something for everybody. This is probably one of the hardest things you could possibly do with your training and nutrition. but if you can get through it and you lose a tremendous amount of body fat really quickly, then you can, you can kind of, you can slow it down. You can take your time, right? So, cause normally what I do is I, I start and January 2nd and I'll go until the 25th of February, which is my birthday. So I give myself a good, like seven and a half, eight weeks, something like that. Right. And this time I wanted to see if I could take it a little bit further. I usually get down to like eight or nine percent. And this time I'm like, well, I'm getting old. Do I still have it within me to get even leaner than that? Like, OK, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is I need to start a little bit earlier. And if I can get a good bit of it off right at the jump start, then I can I can have some fun during Christmas and New Year's. And I can slow it down a little bit because I'll be starting on January 2nd at a significantly leaner position than I usually do. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Start it off quick now. And then you have, you know, obviously Christmas, stuff like that. And then you can slow it down. But you also give yourself more time. So you're looking to get pretty shredded during this. Yeah, I'm going to try to get more shredded than I have in a long time. But like this really extreme difficult, like at this lean level of body fat, very difficult. You have to be like, you have to have a coming to Jesus talk with yourself because you're going to be in some pretty dark places during that. So if you're, if you're under 15%, like a real 15%, not what the bros on line think is 15%, but a real 15%, it's pretty brutal. And it's, it's unnecessary really. If you, because all I'm doing is I'm just speeding up the process by what, four to six weeks. That's all I'm doing. Right. But if you are really overweight it a great diet If you can if you can stay on it even with a lot of the new GPs that have come out like the ozempics and the things like that If you look at some of the literature where they talk about like and you see this in the news where we talk about, oh, ozempic causes like muscle loss. It can, yeah, because it basically makes you not eat. But all the recommendations on how to, on how to overcome that are basically protein sparing, modified fast and low volume weightlifting. Now that's not what they're saying. That's what I'm saying. But I was looking through a bunch of the data the other day because one of my clients wants to take some GLP-1. And they basically say you need to up your protein quite a bit and you need to make sure you're lifting weights, but don't lift weights too much. So that sounds just like a protein sparing modified fast. So you just eat all protein and you train like three days a week with just enough volume to not waste your muscle. You throw a GLP-1, which I'm not doing. I would if I could get my hands on it. I'd try it. Why not? Because I haven't tried that class yet. But it's like it sounds like that would be the perfect trifecta combination for people that wanted to lose a tremendous amount of body fat. If you were 40% body fat and you wanted to rip it off really quick, you could feasibly do that long term if you're that overweight. And then when you get to an average body weight level, you can start to slow it down a little bit. and people would not have a problem losing weight if that was the case. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't understand like, you know, they, and this comes back to what we initially talked about, how like, you know, people say like, oh, you shouldn't lose this quick or again, and they kind of lose, they just don't understand that like where you're at, like the nuance of it is super important. So kind of what you're saying there is like, obviously at higher body fat levels, you know, we can, we can push the weight loss. Like you don't really need to necessarily worry about that, that too much. And people get too caught up and like, oh, you know, metabolic adaptation and stuff like that. When it's like, when you're that high of body fat, it really isn't that important. But as you get leaner, that's something that you, again, you may want to start to pay attention to a little bit more. You probably can't do these extreme weight loss protocols for extended periods of time. Cause then you will potentially, you know, lose muscle and feel like crap in the process. Yeah. Well, you know what I said earlier about walking stuff back. I have had to walk stuff back. I just don't do it publicly because I think it's obnoxious. But if you, if you're in cerebral subscription, or if you come to my courses, you come to live courses, you'll hear me say all the time, look, this is what I used to think this is what I was taught and we were wrong. And then I apologize. Now, let me tell you where this is applicable. But also, let me tell you the opposite side of that as well. So you have a clear picture. But, you know, I used to say, oh, I used to be the same guy. Like you can't you can't put guys under fifteen hundred and women under twelve hundred. You got to feed blah, blah, blah. And it's it's it's not it's not correct. It isn't like it just depends. If you eat really low like that. Yeah. You have to modify a lot of other things you're doing. And yeah, you're going to have an issue with performance and sleep and mood that there are, it's not without negative side effects, which is why a lot of people can't handle it because it's, it's just, it sucks. It's, but you have to look at it like this is a, this is a small piece of time. If I'm looking at a year and this is say four weeks of that year, that's not a lot of time. If I can just push through this, I'm good. And then you can decide to go on something that's a little bit more moderate. But, you know, a few years ago, like around right before COVID and during COVID, a little bit after everybody was talking about reds, relative energy deficiency in sport. And they got in this really big kick that you need to keep feeding people more that everybody's going to get reds if you put them on low calories. And I'm like, wait a minute. No, no, no. This is relative energy deficiency for sport. These are people who are training like 21 hours a week and eating 1200 calories. Your client who's massively overweight kind of goes through the motions three days a week at the gym. It doesn't really, they exercise, they don't actually train that fat people don't get reds. Sorry. They have, they have ample amounts of stored energy on their body. And if you look at the Minnesota starvation study, and if you look at, there was another study where they had a guy that was three, I think it's 375 pounds and he went 360 something days with zero food. He basically had a multivitamin mineral in water and it was in a nutrition award. It was underseen by doctors and he lost all the weight and he kept it off. Like technically speaking, if you have that much food that's already on your body that you haven't, it's like food from the past, right? Food that if you have body fat, that is food from the past that for whatever reason you couldn't deal with at the time, you're not going to starve to death as long as you have all the cofactors you need to run your biochemistry and you stay hydrated, you're fine. Now, you shouldn't do that unless you're under doctor supervision. However, this notion that you can't feed people low-calorie diets, they're going to lose muscle. So what? It's not healthy. Neither is being obese. So you pick your poison. You're either obese and dying or you shred it down and you do an unhealthy long unsustainable diet for a while to get your body weight and your fat level to a healthy position And then you learn how to eat normally again. Well, and I'm sure even in that process, because of the fact that, you know, we have plenty of energy on our bodies, as long as, you know, we're doing some of these things we're talking about, Hey, you're lifting at least a little bit, right. You're, you're eating protein. I mean, you really, you know, maybe you lose a little bit of muscle, but I mean, you really realistically shouldn't lose that much anyways, at that point, right. With based on wherever right. Well, well, you will, you will, if you're really obese, you will. And, but, but there's a, there's a very good reason for this. And there's also a reason why it's not a big deal. People who are significantly overweight already have an unnatural, a naturally higher level of lean body mass anyways, from carrying all the weight around. Okay. So when, if you lose that, if you look at the statistics, a lot of people who are really like morbidly obese have 25% increased lean body mass or increased muscle tissue, whatever you want to call it, because something has to support all that muscle. Now, when they get to the point where they can't produce enough muscle to overcome that, now you get people who are bedridden or they have to sit in those little scooters and things like that. And we're talking people who are like six, 700 pounds. But if you get a guy who's 400 pounds, there's a good chance that he has basically the lean body mass of a guy on steroids, but not from the steroids, just from carrying around like 50% more weight than his body needs to be carrying. So even if you lose some of that, it's not that big of a deal because it shouldn't be there anyways, because it's only there because something has to fight gravity when you stand up. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah. So, I mean, that's something that I've probably been wrong on in the past too, where I'm like, well, you know, these people probably don't have as much muscle as they think, but from what it sounds like, you know, maybe they do have a little bit more because of the fact that you just, I mean, you're carrying all that weight around and that's resistance. Let me get my, I always have my calculator. It's my favorite thing. Let's say you get a guy who's 450 pounds, right? Now let's say that 70% body fat. Yeah, that's 350. That's 315 pounds, right? So that means 30% that for, what did I say? 315 divided by 0.7 times 0.3. I mean, he's got a, he's got a pretty decent amount of muscle on him. Like he, even if you lose some of that, it's not like he's going to have sarcopenia and brittle bones. And you know, his bones are probably, if you put them in a DEXA scan, probably bones are better than every, anybody else you see, because again, something has to hold that weight up as it fights gravity. So, I mean, I think this is kind of a good segue into this. So like, I mean, this is something too, that I've learned from you is like kind of the adaptations at both, both ends of the body fat spectrum, right? Again, people kind of think it's like, again, same principles still apply from, you know, losing body fat, but you know, and we may have hit on this a little bit, but what are some of the differences as you kind of like lose body fat in terms of how you would potentially go about like, like dropping that body fat? Like looking through the different categories, right? Yep. Yeah. So, and again, I always love to give credit where I learn stuff. I got this from Lon McDonald. I don't know if this is his proprietary thing. I don't know if he got this out of research or who he got it from. I don't know, but I'd still, that's who I learned from. So I'm going to also say, give him the credit, even though he called me a donkey ass once and called me a steroid freak monkey and then banned me on Facebook. But I don't care. I don't care. You can call me whatever you want. If you have good information, we're still good. I don't give a shit. Like I'm a Xenual. Like I'm from back. Nothing offends me. You can say anything you want about me. I don't give a, don't talk about my dogs and my wife or my car. I'll fuck you up. But talk about me. I don't give a shit. So, but so you lay these categories out where you have three categories. So category three would be like the really big people, the big, the really gravitationally challenged people. So the people in the middle are going to be more of your average types of body fat percentages. and then, you know, all the way to where they're starting to get obese, all the way down where we're starting to get lean. And then you have the really lean people. So what we reckon is that each category, your physiology is going to be a little bit different. Okay. So if you look at people who are really lean, like you and me, like we're probably have really good functioning mitochondria. We can oxidize nutrients really well. You know, you're probably just like me. Like as long as we stick to just a good clean diet and calories, we don't put on any fat and we look ripped all the time, right? Once you get super shredded or once you get lean, or if you're genetically, your genetics are set up for that, like you won the genetic lottery, it's easier for you to not gain weight. So yeah, people are really good oxidizers. And that could be again, genetics, it could be the function, it could be nature versus nurture, right? Nature, meaning that you're genetically set up that way, nurture. You got that way because you like me and you trained for the last 35 years of your life and you into nutrition and you keep shit clean most of the time like good oxidizers The problem with people who are really lean is their bodies don want to get rid of the fat right Because as you get leaner your brain goes wait a minute I don like this Like we're losing this stored energy and we come from hunter gatherers. There's no inherent benefit to being 3% body fat when you're hunting, gathering on the Serengeti, right? So like your body's going to get resistant at some point. So that's why when you look at bodybuilders, they take things like clenbuterol, albuterol, they take things like that, these beta agonists that pretty much influence the fat cells to release their fat because they get to a point where it gets more and more difficult to get that last little bit of fat off. They can oxidize the fat if they can get it to the mitochondria. They have a problem getting it from fat cells to muscle cells or fat cells to mitochondria. Now, when you go on the other end of that spectrum, when you have really overweight people, they have no problem getting the fat out of the fat cells. They have a problem oxidizing it. And this is why you'll see really high blood fats in people, really high triglycerides that it has nowhere to go until they make new, new fat cells because a fat cell can only get to a certain size before it ruptures. So as it starts to grow in size, the body responds by pushing that back out in the bloodstream so it can it can basically save the cell okay but the problem is it's in the bloodstream it has nowhere to go now because if it goes to the muscle cell you can't really turn it into heat or or energy in any great degree so then the the muscle cell goes well i'll just i'll store it here or i'll push it back in the bloodstream we'll store it somewhere else like on your liver or in your veins so we'll get ectopic lipid storage. We'll put it in your eyes. We'll put it in your kidneys. We'll put it everywhere else because we have to get rid of it somehow, right? Because if we think about what that is, it's basically energy. And anything can be toxic if it's at a certain level. If I drink enough water really quickly, it could give me a heart attack. It can kill you, right? If I get too much pure oxygen, it can kill you. If you have too much energy in your bloodstream, it can kill you. So when you think about a diabetic, like my cousin had type two diabetes, had no idea. Actually, yeah, he had. Yeah, he didn't have type. He had type two, but it had gotten to the point where it was almost like having type one, but it wasn't an autoimmune disease. It was basically what I call lifestyle diabetes, which is type two diabetes. He was really overweight. He never checked his blood sugar. He had no idea he was on a walk and he passed out and woke up in the hospital and his blood sugars were something like 800, like crazy. He almost died. And so a lot of people don't know like that, that signifying that you have way, way too much blood sugar in your bloodstream, which doesn't really have anything to do with the sugar. It has to do with toxic levels of energy in the bloodstream. That could be sugar. That could be ketones. That could be fat. Just some things will kill you faster than others. Like sugar will, you have a massive increase in blood sugar that will kill you a lot faster than having too much fat in the bloodstream. Fat, too much fat in the bloodstream kills you really slowly. Blood sugar can kill you immediately if it gets way too low or way too high. And just for anybody who's listening to this that doesn't know like normal blood sugar levels. So if you look at American Freedom Units, you should have somewhere between 70 and 100. The optimal range based on the literature is around 84 to 86, right? And when you eat, that's going to jump up to say 100, 110, 120, 130. Once it gets past 140, that's a key indicator that you are pre-diabetic or possibly diabetic type two, which I think they should stop calling type two diabetes, diabetes, because type one and type two are two completely different diseases. So it creates a lot of confusion with people who don't know this stuff. But if you look at something like, and let me change that into our units now that I'm overseas and we use metrics. So anybody who's outside of America uses metric system, you're going to look at somewhere around 70, somewhere around like 3.9 to about 5.5, 5.6 is considered pretty normal. Once you get up to around like 7.7, 7.8, now you're getting in the diabetes zone. right? So if you think about that, my cousin, he was sitting at 800. He was eight over eight times the normal amount of blood sugar, which can put you in a diabetic coma and kill you immediately. Yeah. That's, that's freaking insane. That's yeah. So, so it sounds like, again, it's just kind of energy overload and that energy really has like no, nowhere to go. Essentially. Can I go use the bathroom real quick? Dude. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Sorry. So when you're at these kinds of higher bodies, I mean, what, what would you say are like, maybe the biggest differences? I know one thing that, you know, you've kind of mentioned too, is like, you know, for these types of people, it's like, we really want to try to, again, this is something that's gotten poo-pooed, I feel like in the industry of like, oh, cardio, you don't want to do it to lose body fat. But from my understanding, you know,

These types of people, we really want to try to get that like movement up and again, try to get that like you call it a huffy puffy stuff. Huffy puffy shit. Maybe I can't remember what you call it. Yeah, huffy puffy shit. Yeah. Well, OK, so and again, there's so many different ways you can look at this. Do you need cardio to lose weight? No. A lot of people say it's a very inefficient way of losing weight because you don't burn that many calories when you train. And I'm like, well, it depends what you're doing. and it depends on the other things, the way you've orchestrated the rest of your strategy. At the end of the day, a lot of people who are really overweight, they don't do anything. They're fairly sedentary. And a lot of them are gonna have a hard time managing their appetite. So if they could manage their appetite, all of these new GLP drugs would not exist. Like that's basically what they're doing. Not all of them are doing that, but the main premise of that category of drug is to kill your hunger so that you don't eat. Okay, what does that sound like? A big calorie deficit. Cool. And a lot of output and not that much input. So I would look at it from a, I'm always looking at it from a mechanistic side as well. If you do, if we look at those category three people and we come to an understanding that they probably don't have good functioning mitochondria and we could make that better, what's the easiest way to increase mitochondrial content and and increase the performance of how the mitochondria function is aerobic training so it's like okay even if they're not burning a lot of calories and they do aerobics which is false which is false somebody doing a good decent clip of cardio for an hour especially if they're overweight they could be burning off 600 700 calories you go do jujitsu jujitsu an hour you could burn off 900 to 1200 calories in an hour if you're just constantly doing jujitsu, right? So I think it's a bit, it's fallacious to say that the cardio is not going to help and that you don't need to do it. Now, it's not a very time efficient way of doing things because yes, you're going to have to spend some time walking and doing cardio and doing, depending on how out of shape you are and depending on how overweight you are, you have to find the activity you can actually even do. So let's say you have somebody who's significantly overweight and their knees are hurting all the time from carrying that weight. Going out jogging is probably not a good idea. And I would say jogging for most people is not a good idea because they won't spend time learning how to run properly. It would be like you would never go into the gym and put 400 pounds on the bar for the first time you've ever bench press. You would learn how to bench press first and you'd build to that. But for some reason, people don't look at running in the same manner. They just go out and start running. And I used to because I lived in Austin, Texas for a long time. And it's a big it's place big for running. So you go out to there's a river. It's called a lake, but it's really a river that goes through the middle of Austin. And it's they call it Lady Bird Lake. Now, I will never call it that. It's Town Lake to me because that's what it was before they changed the name. But there's a huge running trails all around, around the river lake thingy. And I used to go out and watch people run and you could tell there was almost nobody, nobody they could run properly. And they're just limping along. You can tell they're not, they're not doing well. They're not loving this. It's like, then why are you doing it? So it's like, if you can't, you don't know how to run correctly, or you're too overweight or your knees hurt or your back hurts, go get on an elliptical, go get on an airdyne, Go get on a bike, do something non-impact that just lets you go as hard as you can comfortably go and within the constraints of your limits. But that's going to be massively beneficial, especially combined with, say, a lower carbohydrate or lower energy intake diet to increasing how well your mitochondria learn how to oxidize, which means that when that fat gets to the cell, gets in the mitochondria, you can actually do something with it and you can get it to come off really quickly. But we'll say they are right that it is all diet. Like you can't, I think, I think what people get confused on is they go, well, I'm going to eat and I'm just going to do training and the training will offset the food. That's only true if you don't eat those extra calories back. You can train, you can use training as your deficit if you have the time and the recovery and the capability to do that. So that's usually how I get lean. So if I know that my TDEE is around 3,200 with exercise, and if I eat 2,600 calories, now you can look at that and say, well, you're actually not using training as your deficit. You're using an actual deficit from nutrition. Then I could go, yeah, but let's flip that back around. Let say I decided to eat 2 but then I did 3 calories of work So now I actually exercising for the deficit So in that situation both people are correct Just depends on which side of the fence you're looking at it from, right? Because if I look at TDEE without exercise, mine's going to be around. If I get just a normal amount of steps, say 7,000, 8,000 steps a day, and I'm eating a good mixed diet, my thermic effect is okay. I'm going to burn off around 2,400 calories. The only reason I need to eat 3,200 is because I'm training five to seven hours a week. So now tell me that training is not creating the deficit. It is creating the deficit because if I remove that, I would no longer be in the deficit. Do you find that like that works better in certain situations or just in general for really anybody, if they can exercise more, you know, you obviously are able to eat a little bit more and still create that deficit. I think that would be, it would be time management and goal specific, right? I like to eat. So if I want to eat more, if I want to eat 3,200 calories a day, I'm going to have to train for that. So if I, if I, let's say one day I woke up and you're like, man, I just really don't feel like eating. Okay. I would, I would just go and I would train a couple of times a week and get my steps in and my little bit of cardio and I would just eat less. But if you're like me and you like to eat, then it's like, all right, well, in order to, I've got to, I have to earn those calories. So in order to be able to eat that much or diet on a higher amount of calories, those calories have to be put somewhere. Right. So but you go through you go through phases like there are times where I'm sitting, I'm chained to this desk or I'm traveling. I just don't have a lot of time to train. If I know that, then diet becomes the main the main operator. But if I'm at home and I can train a lot and I love to train and if you do love to train like cool training now is realistically a big part of that. that deficit because it's a big part of calories out and you just have to match, make sure that your nutrition is set up correctly so that you do stay in a deficit. But a lot of people that in this, I remember back in the eighties and nineties, this was the kind of the thing people would eat whatever they wanted to. And then they go to aerobics class and they, well, I burned all that off. I'm like, no, you either equalized it or you're still on a surplus. And like in the early stages of me becoming a trainer, I remember my mentor Charles would say this, he'd call it the chunky aerobics instructor syndrome. And it was true because all of these aerobics instructors who were teaching, say, four hours a class a day, they would eat whatever the fuck they wanted to, and none of them looked good. The only people that looked good were people that were teaching spin classes, and that's because they were competitive cyclists, so they kept their nutrition well because they were competing in their cycling and triathlons. So there was a massive difference between the people who would just get up there and do Zumba and then go eat a pizza because they danced around for an hour versus the guys who were cycling or like, I'm going to eat for my sport. And that's going to alter my body composition a very different way. And the other people like, well, I earned that pizza and that beer, the different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. Right. Like you said, it's, if you're not, you know, yes, we want to exercise and you can't exercise to, to, you know, help create that deficit. But like, if you're not like moderating that, it's like, that can easily get out of hand. And now it's like, you said, you're either offsetting it or you're eating in a surplus, which again, depending on if you're not tracking things and you're just eating whatever, I mean, it's super easy to do that and you get out of a, out of maintenance and into a surplus if you're not careful with it. And there's pros and cons of everything, right? So if you look at, well, if I keep doing more and more training, I can eat more, but I'm also building up a lot of fatigue and I also have to recover from all of that work. So you can't, you can't endlessly add more work and think, and think that's gonna, that's gonna fix things. But then again, it's like, if you, if you're not going to eat any food, you also can't do much work. So you have to pick your poison. I'm either, I'm either hungry all the time, but I don't have to train that much or I can eat more food, but fuck man, I'm tired from training. I feel like, you know, with all this, you know, I don't know if this is something that you feel like you've seen in the, in this kind of industry, but you kind of get that, like people scared of doing too much exercise, but really what it comes down to is like, obviously like poor programming and stuff, but just people have like, they don't, they don't do the stress management thing. They, they, they sleep terribly. And then they also try to pair it with like terrible nutrition. And then it's like, Oh, you gotta be worried about exercising too much. But I feel like if you can get those things nailed down, I mean, I feel like you, you're, you're a lot of sky's the limit almost in a way from now. Yeah, it really is. It really is. And the thing is too, if you're looking at just fat loss, if you just want fat loss, you really don't have to train that much. You want to be active. You want to, you want to hit bare basic minimum standards, but you're going to have to be really diligent on your diet. Now, if you're like me and you, and you have goals, like performance goals, like you'll probably agree with me here. You and I don't exercise. We train. And gym pop people go I don understand because we both at the gym I like yeah but watch the way I work out versus the way you work out There a difference And I walk in with a plan I got a plan set in place for the next 12 months You don know what the fuck you doing tomorrow Like there a big difference. You don't, you either train or you exercise and either way is fine. Like I tell people, like I don't try, I don't coach people who, who exercise everybody. I've trained, they train, they go in, they know what is expected. There is a direct goal. There's a direct outcome that we're looking for. And the program is designed to get to that goal. And I think if more normal people, normal being like gen pop, if they would set hard and fast goals, write them down and then work with a coach who knew how to get them there and took the training and the dining more seriously, they'd see far better results because a lot of people, I own a gym that's like one of the most gym pop of all gyms you've ever seen. Like most people are at the gym to make themselves feel better so they can eat pizza and beer on the weekends. Right. They're not there to train. We have very few people in my gym, a hundred and something members. Very few of them say I'm training today. Like I'm here because I know I need to do this. Right. So you have to handle those those programs a little bit differently. And the expectations and the outcomes are far different. yeah yeah totally it's like you you know you see a lot of people they just go and like they don't ever really change and again it's probably just from the fact that they're like you said they're exercising they don't really have that that game plan of what they're doing everything's just kind of random and it's like really at that point it's you know kind of a up to you if you know you want to keep doing that or like you said any sort of exercise is going to be perfect but if you want to you know be more efficient with your time which who doesn't you know again like switch that focus to more like training versus just kind of exercising i think everything everything has some benefit right so you know used to i used to be one of those real pompous arrogant assholes that would would laugh at people for doing body combat and zumba and what being a vegan and i was like you know what they could be sitting on their ass eating fucking ding dongs and drinking bottles of bourbon on the week all week like they're doing something and that's better than nothing and now i've kind of gotten frothy about that like a friend of mine did a post the other day and And it was in, it's such a weird, it is, and I'm going to agree with him here. It's a weird and ludicrous fucking activity. But it started in Finland and now it's all over Scandinavia. They have, it started like 20 years ago and they have competitions of it. And people have these, you know, those toy horses that you'd have when you were a kid and you played like a cowboy and they do those and they, they gallop around the fucking arena and jump over things. and you'll hear, you'll see coaches that will go, Oh, so stupid. They should go lift weights. I'm like, okay, here's the thing. They don't want to lift weights. That's not an option for them. You and I know that lifting weights would be better and doing, doing actual like program conditioning and technical work, but they were never going to do that. So it's either they, they race around and pretend like they're Cowboys and Indians and doing, doing toy horse dressage. they either do that or they're doing nothing so we shouldn't be poo-pooing that we should be say hey you be the best fake horse rider in the world you go girl you go boy you do whatever you fucking want because at least they're out there doing something well and then it really just comes down to like okay if they then if they start complaining about not seeing the results they want then we can have that conversation of like all right let's be a little bit more efficient with with what we're doing because at that point they're like hey how do i get better at this you know what's going to make that better if you lifted weights once or twice a week and so that that silly thing that they're doing, that silly activity could be a gateway drug to them actually starting to do like some, some targeted training and doing some weightlifting. Speaking of weight training in general, I feel like this is something too, that I've kind of like, again, I, I think it's super important. I mean, like, again, like I'm, I'm all about, Hey, like body composition, we need to build muscle. We need a weight train, but this is something that I feel like, you know, when I first got into training and it was like, everyone's just kind of really poo pooed on the cardio side of things. And, you know, again, I, do you feel like people maybe overemphasize like the, the, the training side of things and the kind of person that comes to mind is kind of, I feel like it's more so guys, right. That like go to the gym, they lift heavy. And then like, they, again, they're just like higher body fat levels. And they just, do you feel like those types of people don't do enough cardio? Uh, yeah. And I, and I think everything, everything has a time and a place, right? So if you are overweight and you're resting heart rates really high and your sleep's really shit and your HRV is low and you're inflamed and you know, you're not feeling good and you have no capacity to actually no work capacity. You actually, you do a lift and it takes you 10 minutes to recover and you can't actually get more than three things done in a workout. It's probably a good time to do some cardio, but I always use, you can use objective and subjective metrics for this, like objective being, I have quantifiable data. I can attribute either a range or a number or a value and the subject of being more about touchy feely shit. Right. So like if you say I don feel good I feel out of shape I feel fatigued Okay that all subjective But and that really important But let put some objective markers too Oh you have stage two hypertension Your resting heart rate is like 95. Your sleep score is really shit. Your HRV is in the dump. Oh, look at your labs. Your blood fats, trigs are all crap. It's probably time to do some cardio. But I think everybody should do a minimal amount of cardio, just like I think everybody should do a minimal amount of not resistance, training. That's the thing that I like to do, but that all you need to do is apply tension to the muscle. So if you like to do calisthenics, if you like to do movement stuff, crawl around an animal flow, do it. If you like to do like pull-ups at the park, do it. The, the, the only thing the brain knows about this is something is applying tension to the muscles. The joints are opening and closing and the muscle is lengthening and shortening. Your brain doesn't know a barbell curl or your brain doesn't understand a pull-up versus a pull-down. Like, yes, the motor sequencing is different, but your brain, your brain's not going, hey, are we doing this or that today? All it knows is, hey, my lats, my biceps, all this stuff has some type of external load being applied to this. Okay, now I need to get stronger to overcome this because this has kind of been a regular thing week to week. So I think people should find the activities that they're going to be able to be consistent with and enjoy long-term. So it's not like, oh, I'm doing a 12-week program. No, this is what you're doing for the rest of your life. So cardio, yeah, should be part of that. So it's like steps, that's kind of the gateway drug there. But I think steps are being way too overblown now. I think everybody should do probably at least, even the government guidelines for this is pretty good, actually. Like, you know, if I would say if you're getting 150 minutes, some type of mixed cardio between aerobic and maybe some little moderate intensity stuff, you're pretty good. And that's not that big of a deal. You could do 20 minutes of cardio a day and then every other day, switch it up one day, kind of take your heart rate up around 75, 80 for 20 minutes. The next day, do 20 minutes at like 120, 130, mixing some walking there. You got a pretty solid program and it's easy and no muss, no fuss. And it only takes you 20 minutes a day. Right. Yeah. That, that was one thing that you mentioned too. Like, you know, the steps are great and like, you want to stay active, but, but that's like you said, kind of getting a little bit overblown. I feel like at this point in terms of where now people are just doing like crazy amounts of steps and then maybe missing out on saying, doing some of that stuff that kind of gets that heart rate up a little bit more. Well, it's like, once you get, once you get really good at steps, where do you go from there? It's like, okay. So you can only walk so fast before you have to jog mechanically. you can, you can look like a race walker in the Olympics, but at some point you're going to adapt to that. So the next logical thing is I'm going to have to kick up the speed to a jog, or I'm going to have to do an elliptical, but you're going to have to always, once you've made those adaptations, you have to provide a bigger stimulus, slightly bigger. So it's, I either have to add more load or I have to do more volume. Okay. So if you look at steps, if you're walking, say 12,000 steps a day, which is a lot. If you set a desk like I do all day, there are days I get 1,700 steps. There's no way. There's no such thing as steps. I'm going to have to do dedicated exercise, whether that's steps or cardio or whatever I'm going to do. But to make up that 6,000, 7,000 steps that I'm missing, I'm going to have to do something because you might not have time to go out and walk for an hour and a half to get your 9,000 steps. So let's say you're hitting a certain threshold of steps and you've made that a habit and you're like, there's no way I can get more steps. It's going to be impossible. Well, your coach tells you to go to 15,000 steps. Like that's another 30 minutes of walking. That's not going to happen. Like, okay, what's the next logical step? Well, I can't do more volume. Maybe I bring the volume down a little bit and I do my steps a little bit harder. Well, what are harder steps? Jogging, elliptical, adding some resistance, going a little bit faster. Basically, it's basically a factor of speed. Speed and cardio creates intensity. If you're on a machine or you add a weighted vest or you add some type of external device, now you can leverage load as well. But in every gym I've ever been to on the face of the planet, there's always three old bro dudes that train with each other Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And you'll watch them. Monday is always International Chest and Biceps Day. So you'll watch them. Day one that you see them, maybe they're bench pressing 225 pounds. pounds for a few reps. You go and you look at them again, three years later, they're still benching 225 for three. They haven't gotten any better. They haven't gotten any stronger. The bodies look the same. Well, what's the problem? Well, they never did more reps. They never added more weight. So of course they're going to stay there because there's nothing to create more adaptation. And the same thing can be said about cardio. If you do 60 minutes of cardio every day, and you never raise the incline, you never go faster. You never add

more load to it, you're going to be the same as you were 12 months ago. And that was the, like the biggest joke that, that a lot of trainers will do against cardio. They're like, look at the people January 1st, they're at the gym doing cardio the next year. They're, they're still fat. They're no more in shape. Yeah. Because they're still doing the same fucking thing they did a year ago and they never progressed anything. It's just about progression. Yeah. And again, it's all, I think this all comes back to, like you said, initially too, it's like, where are you at? Right. You know, for some people it's like, Hey, they maybe need to lift a little bit more, but then some people, again, they maybe need to do a little bit more, as you like to say, huffy puffy shit. What does your kind of cardio look like at the moment? What do you typically do for that? Right now, nothing because my calories are so low. Well, I probably will today. I was really busy last few days recording tons of content for Cerebro subscription, but today I think I'm going to, but it'll be minimal. It'll be, I'll go for a walk and I may get on, I have an elliptical at home. I'll probably get on that or I'll get on my assault runner and put a movie on and I'll just, I'll just kick back and I'll, maybe I'll study a little bit while I do my cardio. I'll read one of my books, something like that. So, but when I'm not dieting this hard, then mine is always going to be based on my metrics. So like my resting heart rate is like 47, 48 right now. So I could slog along and keep doing more just standard aerobic work, but like, what's the point? Like I'm already at a really good heart rate, HRV, blood pressure. So I'll probably opt to do a little bit more hit work or a little bit more anaerobic work because the most important thing is going to be the aerobic. Like that is a fundamental truth. Everybody needs good aerobic capacity if they care about anti-aging longevity and also not just not just living to an old age, but actually living to an old age. Those are two different things, but it's like living when you're older or just waiting to die when you're older, which one, which is your choice. So it's like aerobic work is the one that's going to keep your heart healthy. It's going to keep your cardiovascular system healthy. It's going to keep your brain healthy. It's going to keep your IQ up because aerobics increase BDNF and increase brain plasticity. It's going to keep your kid. It's going to keep everything healthier. Now, there is a point where, all right, you've kind of maximized that aerobic. So what's the next step? Well, you have the anaerobic side too. Now, is it that important to have good anaerobic capacity? That can be debatable. I would say it is because as you get older too, you start to have sarcopenia muscle wasting. And what is the number one killer of the elderly? Falling, right? Yeah, falling. So it's like weightlifting can be very protective against that because the stronger you are, the more you can fight against gravity. You're not likely to fall. But you also have to realize that sometimes you fall because you stepped off a curb and you misstepped. Well, that is going to be a movement that is much faster than what you're going to get out of weights. So how can I get around that? Well, I can do plyometric stuff like jump ropes, ankle hops, small box jumps. I can go jog. I can do some type of weight-bearing dynamic movement like walking lunges, stationary lunges, just stuff where I'm actually having to decelerate quickly against the ground, which is something you're not going to get from weights unless you're doing Olympic weightlifting, which I highly recommend for older people to not, not full lifts, but doing like clean pull, snatch, pull, push, press things that are easy to learn and easy to implement that aren't that are technical, but not so technical that it's not outside of people's grasp. But that's a really good scalable way to learn how to beef up reactive force, deceleration strength, eccentric strength, especially at high speed. So that if you, if you're the, if you're older, like, let's say, I mean, again, I'm, I'm thinking I'm almost 47. So I have to think about where I'm going to be at 65, 75, 85. And so let's say I take up tennis at 75. I don't want to be going for a ball and misstep, fall down, break my hip and die in the hospital. So weight training is going to be helpful to prevent that, but it's not going to be complete to help that. There are other things we could add to that of being able to step out and stop my body weight and being able to change direction and not fall down. So cardio doesn't have to be just about your cardiovascular system. It doesn't have to be about speed. It can also be about longevity, anti-aging and, and preventing accidents when you get older. So it sounds like, again, you want to kind of build that good base, but then from there, you know, you can start to incorporate maybe some like kind of higher intensity type stuff. Once you kind of get that good base of cardio in. Yeah. And the higher intensity stuff could be all that. The thing, the nice thing about the anaerobic stuff, you have a, you have a lot more selection of what you can do. Like aerobic stuff is just standard repetitive cyclic stuff Like running is a cyclic movement Cycling is cyclic elliptical is cyclic upper body ergometer everything is a cyclic motion all concentric cyclic motions when you look at anaerobic now we can be we can have a lot of fun because we can hop side to side we can use a slide board we can jump on and off a small box we can jump rope we can do we can go to the park and do like amateur parkour and just but just try to be safe like jumping and running and you know tumbling and that you have a lot more options when it comes to anaerobic stuff. And so it can be a lot more fun for people, but to me, it's never going to be as important as building that aerobic base. And we, we, we know this, this is like, this is not negotiable. It's not debatable. You, you realistically, if you don't want to have a stroke or a heart attack, you don't want to have dementia. You need to do at least a minimal, minimal effective dose of aerobic work every weight. So for you, I mean, obviously, you know, right now you're, you know, dieting on low calories, so you're not doing this, but outside of this, do you still, even though you're resting heart rates, you know, you said like 47, 48, are you still doing a little bit of aerobic base just to kind of keep that or can you can, okay. A hundred percent. But like what I'll probably do is something that's kind of mixed, right? Because the thing with the anaerobic it's because it's high intensity, you don't, you can't do a ton of it. You can do a ton of aerobic work. And if you stay, if you play by the rules, it's not like you have to recover from that. Like no one has to recover from zone one, zone two training, right? Unless you just, you do 10 hours of it, but no one's going to do that unless you're trying to do tour de France, but, or you're an ultra marathoner, but with the anaerobic stuff, it is higher, higher intensity. You can't do a ton of it. So for me, what would be a nice thing is if I went for a walk, like we live in a really nice, quiet area north of Brisbane. I can I've got a 10 minute walk down to the beach and that walk is up a big hill so I can have I can get my heart rate up there. And then I can walk all the way around the beach and there's tons of picnic tables and places to go as basketball courts. I could take my basketball and just I could walk or slow jog at the basketball court, shoot some hoops. I could go and I could jump run like jog and jump onto a bench and jump off of it. You know, there's all kinds of stuff I could do where I could be doing an aerobic session, but throw in some plyometrics, throw in some push ups, throw in some pull ups, just easy, basic stuff to turn it into more of an anaerobic. Yeah, for me, it's like I'll do a couple days of like kind of that more basic kind of like bike, you know, 45 minutes-ish. And then I play hockey once a week, and I kind of count that as my anaerobic, higher intensity type training. It's fun, right? It's a little bit different. So, yeah. Just have fun with it. Yeah. I'm glad you said hockey because I just, I've got, I was a rollerblader back in the 90s, man. Aggressive, aggressive skater. So, a few years ago, I bought some aggressive skates because I have a skate park down the road. And I went over there and I went, wow, this doesn't feel the same when I fall down anymore. So I think this kind of sucks. So I went and bought some cruisers that actually they're taller wheels. So they're faster. They're for city going. So I might, I might actually get on my skates and go out for a nice skate today. That'd be actually be good. Dude, I actually play. So I actually play roller hockey. And so, so I use the roller blaze for that. And yeah, it's, it's fun to, that's a good way to do some cardio. I think go out and hit the blaze. I think that's especially if it's nice out there, which for you guys, it's the summer now. So 100 percent. I tell this to clients, especially women who want to grow booties. Like if you if you go on Google and you image search hockey, but you're going to get all these pictures of professional hockey guys in jeans with these massive asses. I'm telling you, fuck the hip thrust, man. Go get yourself some rollerblades and do that as your cardio and your ass will be fucking enormous. and you'll be able to train the hips in a way that most people need is a bit more abduction and a bit more external rotation. And you can link that up with something that's fun and just go cruise up and down the street on your rollerblades. I do find that, you know, like if I play like a few more games than normal, like my upper like glutes, man, will just be fricking sore as hell from, from, from doing that. And it's kind of funny, this is just off topic, but for me, I've always had like bigger, like outside of my quads versus like, And it kind of makes sense now that you're saying that in terms of how you skate and stuff like that. So muscle grows based on stress lines. So where you apply stress as it's going from joint to joint is where you're going to have a lot of the opportunity to grow to grow that muscle. So if you if you look at guys who skate a lot, you're going to see really big vastus lateralis because that's basically pulling, helping to connect your hip to your knee. And when you skate out and you go into like a 45, more like a 45 degree abduction and then externally rotate, that muscle is in a really good line to now create that tension. So you get a ton of tension through that outside sweep. Yeah super interesting stuff Real quick just kind of last topic I want to bring up We don have to spend too much time on it at all I just am curious I know you kind of brought this up I was watching one of your Cerebo videos Body recomp You know a lot of people say you can like build muscle at a deficit or like build muscle maintenance. What are your kind of like thoughts around that? I think they're full of shit. Yeah, I think it feels good. Now, again, I love debating. I love arguments. I love having arguments and arguing like a civil debate. and the a good person who can debate really well is someone who can basically debate both sides and i try that's what so i always look at that like they're i have friends that i don't agree with how they're teaching coaching but i can agree with what they're saying in the situation that it's presented in but i can also argue against other situations so now they are right in that you can't build a lot of muscle fast while you're trying to diet. Like you have two opposing forces. But the thing is, if you're doing a recomp, you're not looking to do it quickly. So if you're eating to recomp, you're losing fat. You're just going to be losing it slowly, and you're going to be putting on muscle very slowly. It is more efficient to pick your poison. So if you want to get lean, go full Monty getting lean if you want to get lean quickly. So if you were if you were at above average body fat level and you really wanted to be below average body fat level, like you really wanted to be, you know, not say dick skin lean, but fairly lean. Like, let's say if you're a woman and you're sitting at 30 percent, right, that's a pretty that's actually pretty average body fat percentage, like 30 to 34 percent. And then their coach tells them they're 26. I'm like, no, you're not, honey. He's he's he's lost about eight to 10 percent somewhere in there. and don't worry about the number. It doesn't change who you are as a person. It's just the fact that you just have this stored food on your body we got to get rid of. And then you're probably going to, the look you want is probably around 24 to 26%. So you look at that, you go, well, you could grow into that by doing it slowly, but it's going to be way more cost-effective and a better return on your investment faster if you just pull off the 8% to 10%, and then we do a long, slow, lean bulk. And then, you know, so you could do what you can do with, like, fat loss. Fat loss runs really quickly. The difference being, like, anabolic processes work really slowly. It's how we're designed. Catabolic processes work really quickly, and that's why muscle growth takes a long time. Like for, let's say a guy, the first year you're going to put on, if you're, if you're good the whole year and you don't miss your training sessions and you're diligent about your sleep, which is probably the most important factor out of everything we're talking about. If you don't sleep, you are fucking up your programming. You can take all the drugs you want. You can do all the training sessions. You can eat perfect. If you are not sleeping, man, you are really shortchanging yourself. Like if you feel like I was thinking about this this morning to all clients of mine who don't sleep. They're like, what do you take for your brain? You remember everything. And I'm like, no, no, no, I don't take anything. I take nicotine and caffeine for my ADD because it's hard for me to get my drugs, my ADD medication here. I don't take any nootropics. I don't take anything for my brain in that way because what I found was I'm trying to out supplement a sleep issue. So sleep is very important. Now, if you look at going back to what we're talking about, It's like it's going to be much faster to go from, say, 32% body fat to 24. Like, what is that? That's for 12, 12%, right? You could realistically do that if you're pushing it 12 weeks. Or you could take 24 weeks. But if you try to recomp that, it's going to take you 48 weeks. It's going to take you significantly longer, twice as long or longer than that than if you just did a dedicated shred. Now, once you get that dedicated shred, now you have a decision to make. Like, if you want to get stronger and you do want to put on some shape and some size, we could do a lean bulk or you could just bulk and then shred that fat off again. What I would say is if you're looking at fat loss, but you want to grow into it, just focus on the fat loss, get it over with because it's really quick. Then if you want to get size, now do your do your recomp at this point, because you don't put on muscle quickly anyways, unless you take drugs and even those are limited. So if you think a male is going to put around six kilos or around like 13 pounds of actual dry lean muscle tissue in his first year training, then that's going to slow down every year. So if we look at the realistic possibilities, you're putting on maybe 80 to 120 grams of actual dry muscle lean muscle every week So if you look at that if let just say it a hundred 100 grams times 52 weeks is 5 kilos 5 kilos is around 11 11 and a half pounds And then the next year it's going to drop by 20, 25 percent and every year is going to drop. So these people who say you can't recon, you're not going to gain a lot of muscle unless you eat in a massive surplus. You don't gain a lot of muscle quickly anyway. So it's a moot point. You're getting bigger. but as obi-wan said to the stormtroopers these are not the droids you're looking for this is not the bulk you're looking for you're gonna have to diet that off later so it's probably going to take the same amount of time of bulking up and shredding that off is if you just slowly bulked up and you never had to shred again you know this makes more sense that way and it's healthier right well and we've all been there we've all done that that built uh that block that we put on too much weight i know i've been there and um definitely yeah i i agree i think at this point it just makes sense to to do it really slowly. And, you know, like you said, it's just going to, it's not going to be healthy that way if you do it too quickly and everything like that. And then again, it all comes back to the body fat percentage too, where you at with that. I think that's going to play a huge role in that as well too. You know, you got to ask yourself, do you want to have to diet it off later? If you're okay and want to diet it off later, okay, go for it. Like whenever I put on fat, it's not because I'm bulking to get bigger. It's because I'm being an asshole with my nutrition. I just want to eat shit food. Like when I go to Texas, I gain weight because I've got Texas beer, I got barbecue. I got Tex-Mex. So I diet before I go. And now I'm dieting after I got back from Texas. So, but, and just like a final point on that, there's literature that just came out over the last one or two years that say conclusively calories, eating more calories is not the way like, yeah, you, you have to have enough calories to support what you're doing. And if you want to grow, you need probably a little bit more than that, but you don't need a lot more. You need like five, maybe 10% more than your TDEE. So if my TDEE is 3,200 and I don't change anything other than my nutrition, I realistically don't need more than about 3,500 to grow new muscle. But the problem is, especially for men, they want to grow faster than that. So they get on 5,000 calories and they go, I'm not growing. I'm like, yeah, no, you are. You're getting fat and you're not digesting all that food anyways. If you want to, if you want to grow faster, that's why God invented Diana ball. Take Diana ball, put on your big boy pants and stick a needle in your glute. I love it. Yep. I mean, that's, I mean, that's really the only way to speed things up. So speaking of Texas barbecue, I think it was actually the football game race. Maybe it was last night, man. They were showing some, I don't know what place it was, but they were showing that I was like, man, that fricking looks good. Just loading up with the meat and mac and cheese maybe and everything did it look freaking awesome so i have a friend i was talking to him a couple of days ago he he's from new york buffalo new york and he moved to tennessee and he's like man he used to live in austin and i trained him for a long time and he's going to come back on for for coaching again it's been i'm super excited because he's you know you just have you have clients that he's he's a good personal friend but besides that like you just have clients that were fucking stellar this is one of the one of the few guys i had at one point i had a double body weight bench press he was doing single arm chin-ups like just an absolute animal so i'm super excited but he goes man i miss texas barbecue he goes i've not been able to have any barbecue like that since i left and i go bro you're in tennessee like you're in prime pork country you need to go eat some pork barbecue and he goes it's not the same it's not the same as brisket it's not the same as as smoked sausage. He's like, it's good, but it's not, it's not Texas. Like, okay, fair enough. But they do do pork way better than we do. Yeah. I know it makes me, I want to go to Texas now just to, just to try some of that stuff. I might have to cook a, I might have to cook a, cook a brisket this weekend. You can already tell the diet fatigue's kicking in for you, man. Yeah. Well, I will be, I'll be switching phasing out the ketogenic. So that I'm getting my brisket. Perfect. Well, Luke, really appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on. A ton of great information here. I love just kind of hearing your thought process behind everything. I'll let you go. Is there anywhere where you want to lead the audience to? Yeah. All right. They want to go our websites, muscle nerds.net. If you want to go to Instagram, again, we don't expect a whole lot. We're shit on social, but if you follow us, we appreciate it. We're working on it. 2025, that'll be the year has always been speeding it up a little bit, but that's a muscle nerds underscore education. You can follow me. I just got in trouble and got restricted on Instagram and Facebook for some stupid shit. So I, if you like like really bad, politically incorrect memes and you don't get easily offended, you can go to my, my Instagram, Luke Lehman. Uh, but don't send me any, don't question, no questions. Don't ask me about muscle nerds. That is my, that's where I get away to just talk about memes and post memes. It has nothing to do with muscle nerds. So muscle nerds is the professional side. The other, the, the personal counts a little bit more personal, I guess, essentially would be the way to put it. One of Zoe's friends was they were laughing about the