Meet The Internets Muscle Nerd!

# Meet The Internets Muscle Nerd!

**Channel:** Matt Peacock
**Published:** 2025-08-18
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=UTZz9nKByKA

what's up guys welcome back to another episode of push pill profit today i am joined by my mentor luke lehman who runs muscle nerds who is my longest serving mentor and we're basically we had a big long discussion all about a lot of things we started with where luke was when he started the industry working with charles poliquin luke's thoughts on the state of the industry in 2025 social media and luke's love or hate for that programming manipulations biochemistry we went down a deep fucking rabbit hole on getting sugar into the cell and everything in between and a bunch of our personal anecdotes from the yeah 50 years in the coaching industry between us let's get stuck into it so skip into the part where you joined the industry like how talk to me when you started the industry yeah okay so i started i mean i started training when i was young and basically studying all the old school guys like paul chick charles pollock and charles Staley, all those guys. And started writing stuff for my friends and wanted to go to college for that. My mom said, absolutely not. Like that's a hobby. You'll never make a career out of that. So I had to go to learn, learn it the hard way of going to college and do something I didn't want to do and failed out of college. And then I decided, you know what, I'm just going to take that college money that I would have used for that. Cause I was broke too. Like I didn't have pot to piss in. I saved up and then went to see Charles Poliquin who was my biggest mentor in the industry. First time really leaving Texas, flying across the country and spending like three or four days learning some of his stuff. And I was hooked at that point. So the next minute, like I got into the industry, I started selling fitness equipment during the day. I started training people before and after work. Got tired of that, went full on into training and saved up all my money and went to see Charles. Like he said, like you need to find a mentor and stick with that person until you feel like you can't learn anything else. That's what I did with him. But eventually, instead of learning everything I could and leaving, he asked me to come on and start being a teacher. So I got invited into the education realm and started working for Pollock & Gruden. What did that feel like? Fuck, it was crazy because the minute I did the first, so I did the first PICP, which is their program design and coaching for like Olympic athletes, world national level team sports and individual sports. And it was like, it was really, it was surreal. I knew at that moment that the culture that they had back then was amazing. And I fit perfectly in there. So I went, I want to work, like I'm going to make a concerted effort to work for Charles Poliquin at some point. And so I would do anything for free. Like I would go to seminars. I would help people out. We had forums online where I would get on and just help people and not ask for any money. That got me noticed by a lot of guys. So I started doing online training in 2007 when there wasn't, that didn't exist. Like we were sending, we didn't have training management software. It wasn't true coaching. It was Excel sheets and word. And I mean, I can remember sending some programs off on a fax machine. Like that's how archaic it was at that time. but Charles took notice of me helping people and getting on the forums being really interactive and one yeah I was at like I think PICP three and he came up to me it might have been four and he came up to me and said do you do you want to do you want to work for us part-time and start teaching and be an assistant coach and I was like hell yeah absolutely and that's what got it started yeah so I did that for a while and eventually I got uh they hired me to come on full-time which is a whole nother clusterfuck it's uh i showed up and charles was gone like that was when the entire industry turned at least for them that whole company turned so charles was gone his right hand man andre benoit was gone ron finley was gone and i show up and i'm like where is everybody and they're like oh they're not here anymore i'm going i just packed all my shit into storage and drove across the country and you you probably could have told me this before i got here that would have been handy information that would have been real handy information i still would have gone but at least i would have been prepared for what i walked into i mean you you took i mean exclusively you took a lot from charles like you learned a lot from him what do you think like what do you think you that charles taught you that stuck with you i mean got everything i mean it's it's he influenced everything that i do um he but both positive and negative so the part The positive things, he got me interested in physical culture history and knowing that there are some things that are new in there. There's always some few things that are being invented, but most of what we know, we've known for 100 and something years. So what Charles was really good at is studying other people systems and then using those to create his own systems and also to funnel down all this information into usable periodized structure that would work for people And yeah so he got me interested in the part of how important programming is Like not just the coaching, but you have to have a plan. You have to have a long-term plan, short-term plan. It has to make sense. And got me into the science of thinking about what happens in the biochemistry. If I do A, what is the, from the cause, what's the effect? and how is that going to plan out over a long period of time so you're not just throwing exercise at people for no reason. He taught me the importance of looking at people's structure and the structural balance, how they move, and fixing those issues. Yeah, so he's absolutely the cornerstone of everything that I do. But I tell you, probably the biggest thing he taught me is don't just worry about the science and the papers because especially in nutritional science and exercise science, they're always decades behind what we're already doing. So he was one of the only people that had the courage to put these ideas out there while the science hadn't actually confirmed that, and everybody said he was crazy. But you go decades into the future, and everything that he told us back then, pretty much 85% of what he taught us, is now being shown in research to be true. Yeah, I mean, it's clear to see you learn an absolute shitload from him, and it's always fun hearing it. It's weird hearing it in this context, actually, because you've taught me this back over the years. So I kind of know the answers to these questions, but it's nice to hear slightly different things. I suppose here's an interesting question. Do you think, as coaches, everyone should know the science? Like your sense, like if this is happening, and I'm doing this, and this is happening, what's happening in between, and why? Do you think coaches need to know that? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, if you're going to be a professional coach or a professional trainer, you should probably know what you're doing. You should probably be able to create predictability outcomes so that when you tell a client, okay, here we are, here's the timeline from here to here, and then this is what we're going to do next. Because if you don't know what the consequences, both positive and negative, of what you're doing, you don't actually know where the bus is driving. It's like trying to drive somewhere without a GPS, and you've never been there. You're going to drive across country. You don't know where the fuck you're going to end up. If you get there. So it's one thing to understand program design. It's quite another level of depth to understand what happens when I do something. Yeah. And then know, like inherently know where that person is going to be in, say, six weeks, six months, six years. I suppose there's a lot. And this is the discussion we had in the car earlier on where it's like, OK, there's the science evidence. But then there's also like running your own experiments and gaining your own insights. but I think the more interesting angle potentially the one that Zoe said when I said what should we talk about she was like you know what you guys should talk about I'm curious to know the answer to this question and it's loaded as fuck fuck what are your thoughts on the current state of the fitness industry in 2025 where do you fucking start with that man it's a fucking dumpster fire the thing that I hate the most is all the social media shit like i remember like discuss this all the time yeah when i came up there was nothing like you you is word of mouth like you couldn't do funnels and pay for ads and and then try you if you didn't know what you were talking about you would quickly be outed yeah for sure and now the people who are paying for training don't know the difference between somebody who knows what they're doing and what they're not and a dinosaur like myself is at a massive disadvantage now because you get you know these young guys who started training eight six weeks ago and now they're coaches but they're really fucking good at marketing and doing video because they've grown up with that and they're they've learned that in school so they can create a shiny object that looks they can fake it until they make it no bite right yeah 100% they can completely fake it and the problem is when we're talking about weight lifting we're talking about physiology we're talking about nutrition supplementations and the massive amount of drugs people are on these days like it's crazy teenagers are on drugs shout out to drugs shout out shout out to trend um and then look i do love drugs like or i did many years ago but uh yeah but um it's we have a duty of care and we have a duty of professionalism yeah and you should know your craft inside and out and you should be able to do that it's not like you need a phd in biochemistry but you probably should understand at least first second semester biochem first second semester biology physiology read a fucking textbook try not stop getting all your information from youtube and tiktok at best for some people no i think it interesting because obviously you came up before social media when i came up it was there But I didn use it yet I was one of those guys that I didn have social media didn like it but then I realized I needed it for work But still like I built my business on the gym floor. Yeah, and that wasn't fucking Instagram or Facebook. It was Doing good work on the gym floor right whereas now say I just want to start and go straight online Yeah, and I just want to put these, you know shiny posts up I totally agree that that is a challenge. That drives me absolutely batshit crazy. I know it drives you more mental than me because there's that slight difference in our vintages in the industry. How the fuck are you supposed to online train somebody? We've never trained someone in person. I have a firm belief on this where it's like when people ask me, can you just go straight online? What's your answer to that? No. You need experience. You need to do an apprenticeship. You need to be under somebody. You need to do your continuing education. You need to train thousands of training hours. Yes. And then go online if you want. But the problem is there's many different ways you can do online. The way we do online training is very different. When I hear coaches say they're training 100 people at once, I'm like, you're not. You're not coaching all those people. Now you are sending programs and you may be monitoring some things. To be clear, though, if it's one coach. If it's one coach, right. So that's important differentiation for anyone listening. 100%. Because we've got hundreds of clients. There you go. But I have multiple coaches underneath me. There you go. But one person coaching 100 plus people. No, no fucking way. There's no way. And the way we do ours is it's like Back to the Future, the movie, right? We're coaching you from the future. You've just already done the workout. So when we design the programs, it's a lengthy process with assessments and talks and all the stuff. Like we do a lot of pre done work, program it out and they do the workout. And then after they've done it, we look at their videos. We look at their comments. We take screenshots. We do video stuff. We draw little diagrams and all kinds of shit and we tell them what to do. And then we try to get them to do that the next workout. And the process continues. It's the same process as if I was there with you and I was coaching you in person. It's the same experience. It's just you've already done it. and without the doing it in person first you had no clue how to do that yeah i believe i believe the same and there are lots of people that say you know you can you can just go straight online i always tell coaches i don't think you should and the word you used which is the fucking money shot is an apprenticeship yeah now obviously i was fortunate to do an actual apprenticeship in another industry so i knew what apprenticeship was like so then viewing the gym floors and apprenticeship all over again to learn what you do like what you don't like who you work well with who you don't work with where are the holes in your knowledge like when you have someone like remember one really overweight guy came for personal training and i had i'd had people that were overweight before but this guy was like obese i had no fucking clue how to deal with the psychological impact of that and like online it's even harder because people are telling you half truths or showing you it's very hard to lie to a personal trainer in the gym if i can see that you're not making progress or i can see you can't physically do something if you can't remember how to do something from the last session but you've told me you logged you know three of that exercise this week i'm like there's no fucking way you did this by yourself bro i mean and there's no way you can look at a video and coach that without developing a coach's eye in person another good word coach's eye yeah because let's say someone's squatting okay are they twisting or are they shifting or is that do they have too much anterior center of mass displacement are they setting up correctly if you haven't been there and gone hey hold on a second put the bar back let's set up a different way to use a different foot position and use a different type of bracing and cue how are you supposed to do that on watching a video even all this sensory stuff where it's like what are you feeling like we're like even like that that overweight guy i remember speaking to you when i was working with him and he was in a chest press and he was feeling his bicep i'm like what the fuck is going on you're like he's probably just feeling the stretch he has no ability to get fuel into the fucking triceps and and and pecs he can't even push glycogen in there he's like incapable of working out with what he's feeling is the stretch of his bicep at the back yeah and that that's about it um imagine too so you don't have somebody doesn't has never developed a coach's eye because they went straight from getting a basic certification and jumping in online training they're going to spend a dozen sessions going try this they go do it nope that hurts try this that hurt worse sure let's go back the other way and try this they're going to waste that client's money and time trying to figure out whereas if you had been in the gym and understood the mechanics of the lift and coached it a lot you could go hey, do this and this, that should rectify it. Client does it, oh, the pain's gone. But you can't do that without experience. You can't, and then there's the experience thing and it's the education thing, which is obviously where you come into my life, where we probably spent most of our time on biochemistry and drugs Yeah And drugs not on drugs but questionably on drugs sometimes on our calls depends on who asking but um i think for me like that was the big thing i took away from you is like cool programming like we i think the programming stuff i took for granted on the basis that it was obvious on the way in that i was going to learn that i think like my preconception of coming to muscle nerds was i will learn programming methodologies and everything in between but then when we when you touched on biochem i remember just being like this light bulb going off and being like holy shit and it wasn't a positive one it was a i do not know anything like i remember you in the that seminar you asked you started talking about the krebs cycle and you said does anyone is any of my mentorship students and a couple of guys put their hands up i obviously wasn't yet and you started drawing it and you're like can you come and finish this i remember that moment in my life just being like committing mentally to be like that's not going to help me in the gym floor like in an instant but like i want to be that guy yeah and i think well what are your thoughts on like knowing kind of i think there could be someone listening or watching thinking why the fuck would i need another crib cycle biochemistry truly learning squats is more important i mean it's all important is it but if we look at from the like i say a biochemical standpoint people think it's a really hard subject to learn but the the easy fundamental stuff of how we move energy and how we transfer one piece of matter to another piece of matter and then finally into heat or energy it's not inherently that complicated but people are really fucking lazy and they won't spend the time to learn this stuff but the reason it's important is if we if we look at most pts in most countries i know it is probably here and especially australia and the united states a personal trainer's legally not allowed to give nutritional advice beyond like eight cups of water a day, eat enough protein, make sure you eat three meals and a couple of snacks. They have basic general guidelines they can give. Now, we all know that we all give people prescribed nutrition because the clients expect that. They don't want to pay money to a trainer and then also have to go to a nutritionist. That's realistically what should happen, but we're going to lose clients. As long as you don't fuck anybody up and you're really careful about it, fine. But how do you know if what you're doing for that person is exactly what they need or if it's going to be disastrous? Well, if there's a contraindication and you put them on a weird diet or weird diet setup, or what if you put them on a diet setup that's evidence-based, but it's actually not the right thing for them to get them where they need to go right now, right? So if you know the chemistry of things, then you can form your own ideas about high carb, low carb, high protein, low protein, high fat, low fat, what type of fat, what type of carb, because everybody's different. So they're going to react differently. And I'll give you an example. Years ago, when the CGMs, the continuous blood glucose monitors came out, I spent three months with implants in my arm just to see like what happens if I go keto, and then I measure my ketones, and that's giving me my blood glucose. What happens when I go all the carbs what happens when i try different types of carbs and then and then i measured zoe and so it's really it's really interesting because people think a carb is a carb like we take a big carb we break it down right and basically break it down to the three sugars that's going to get in your body galactose glucose and fructose so we think like a glycemic index glycemic load same for everybody it's not so for example there's glycemic individuality individuality. That's right. Between different people. For example, if I eat white rice, like jasmine rice, which I love, my blood sugar hardly moves. If I have a sweet potato, I'm borderline diabetic for the next two hours. She's exact opposite. She can have sweet potatoes, no problem. If she has a cup of white rice, her blood glucose goes astronomically high. If you don't know how to measure that, you don't know how to understand what's happening, or why that's happening, then yeah you could you could they might be doing the client a disservice of not giving an optimal training what we should be doing is giving them really high value for what they're paying for because personal training is not cheap i i totally agree with all this and i can go down a million rabbit holes but i mean briefly i put a cgm on probably when we were working together and i discovered that bananas and any intro workout like a multistation or whatever the hell's in them you know the usual basic carbohydrates that go in there uh intro workout sends me to fucking space Like I had more than pre-diabetic for a couple of hours, like brutal. It made me feel awful as well. Couldn't work it out. Hell of a pump. But like afterwards wasn't, wasn't pretty. But like for me, it's like, I remember learning this stuff from you and getting really, it's hard. I don't think you can give it to someone. I got really excited about, like whenever you taught me this stuff, whenever I found a deficit and not in everything, I'll be honest, I've not told you this. Sometimes we would talk about, you know, a sexist.

it didn't do the same for me and i think it's okay to have and this is the breadth of knowledge a strategic like breadth where it's shallow but you know a lot about a lot of things a little about a lot of things and then like what is that tactical depth which is like this is my fucking area now you are the anomaly because rather than it being like a breadth and depth is all of it because you're fucking not human but for the rest of us that depth is the part where it's like obviously it was biochemistry but i got really excited about that and i know a lot of coaches maybe aren't that excited about all this, but I feel like the big picture topic we're having as a discussion just now is like continued development as a coach, right? We provide continued development in the area that you, some of it you don't like because there's the social media thing and not what we do, but social media, sales marketing, or BDSM is what we call it, business development, sales and marketing. Nice. For you, the other side, we're both continued development for coaches. Agree? Yeah. Right. 100%. What are your thoughts on that concept of continued development for coaches and do you think there's ever a point where you should stop i mean i know your answers to all these questions but i'm always curious to hear what you say i mean i i think you should never stop i think there you should have a beginner's mind you should always be seeking because there's so much to learn there's so much to learn uh i do think that like i have to have width and depth because i teach it right but when with With coaches, when you first get in the industry, you have to do what I call is you got to shovel a lot of shit. So you got to train clients that you don't want to train. You got to deal with issues you don't want to deal because, A, you don't have a choice. You got to earn the right to move up the fucking food chain. That's right. And you need to deal with problem clients. So in the future, they're not that much of a problem. So you also have to have clients. You have to fill up your dance card before you get really choosy and niche down. You also have to figure out who you want to train because you may have somebody who loves training bodybuilders. If you like training bodybuilders, you go into bodybuilding. Powerlifting, powerlifting. CrossFit, crossfit. But it changes as well. Yeah, it can change. It should change, I think. And then you might have people like, I'm a tactician. I'm not an accountability partner. But in the early, which is funny because that's what I'm teaching at your seminar, is compliance, accountability. Part of the reason why I wanted you to teach it because you don't. Yeah. So it's like I had to go, I had to think back like decades ago where, okay, when I actually had to have a lot of empathy for my clients because I had to train a lot of clients that I just like, whatever. Like what, what would I need to know if I was starting out now? What do clients, but now the older you get and the longer you're training people, you then can be more selective about who you train. So like the people that I train now, I'm not empathetic at all. Like I'm a little bit like if they have problems, I help them. but I'm not going to hold their hand and parent them and all that type of thing. But that's a skill set that you need to know. Now, you could be the tactician like I am and move off to that angle where you go into assessments and biomechanics and you go into the nitty-gritty of physiology, or you might go, hey, I really like this whole counseling, the empathetic side. I like the accountability. So I'm not going to worry too much about my program design, just solid enough programs, but I'm really going to go full Monty into the accountability, compliance, the, you know, kashi, hippie, crunchy shit that I don't like. No, I think like picking your area is definitely key. And I think like for me, it was biochemistry for a number of reasons. And I remember, you know, if we're talking like why, like, should you ever stop? I think one of the things that stuck from you to me was probably in that seminar, you mentioned biochemistry for dummies. you know who's read it and i immediately bought it on amazon and then you said like i still will read this book because when i read it i read it with a different mind a different set of eyes a different brain a different a whole different being to the guy that read it the first time and honestly i think i think a lot of coaches get that wrong where are they i read that one next and it's like a conveyor belt and next this goes back to finding your guy or girl and sticking with them yeah it's like the hopping between books topics subjects i think like the cpd thing is super super important but i do think the first few years you kind of look at that strategic breadth i think the sooner you can find where you want to plumb the well of like what do you know and accept the fact that unless you have like rain man powers like you you're not going to learn all of all of it is like where does it where does that best suit you but you have you have said realize I've been in the industry longer than most people too. So I've got decades, I'm decades ahead of most coaches. So I've had a lot more time to do the study. But the key thing is I never stopped. I never stopped. And I would find something I got really passionate at one point it was, was the biochemistry. Then it was like, Oh, nutritional biochemistry is, I mean, that is exercise metabolism. So let's figure out how exercise then alters what happens. So you have like, you have nutritional biochemistry, which is when things come in and what you do with it I was going to ask this question I so glad you gone here And then exercise metabolism which is okay what are the consequences when I do exercise How does that now move that stuff around and then affect what I eating So it's basically two sides of the same coin. So if you learn one, it's really easy to transition to another. And this is why I tell students it's all about stacking. Initially, when you go into a subject, you know, you're fucking complete retard. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. and you're gonna feel stupid and adults don't like feeling ignorant or or stupid embrace that feeling i felt like fucking like like i had brain damage when i walked i certainly did when i walked out of that seminar but walking in i was like i don't even know if this was a good spend of money at this moment in time because i don't know if i even know to speak english and i told you on another call i'm like look sometimes i'm the guy in the room going i have no idea what the fuck this guy's talking about because there's levels and levels and the peak is really fucking high So I'd go to a medical convention. I'm sitting there like, I have no fucking idea what this guy's talking about. I laughed when you said about like exercise and nutritional metabolism. Like, uh, because that was my vote for what you would be presenting tomorrow. I opened my notepads, which are all like labeled up and for you. And I looked at it and I was like, this would be a fucking great topic. The difference between like exercise and nutritional. I wouldn't have even made slides. I would just whiteboarded the whole thing. I fucking love that topic. And I like Sarah was like, that's just your bias. Like just cause you love it. But I actually, I actually like, I actually liked that you're, that they chose for me to talk about. Yeah. Compliancy because it made me, you saw me, I was all day at a computer just like, okay, this and trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. And I was like, okay, I'm actually quite happy with this. And I can actually do it in a way that's not too science-y. Like I'm not going crazy in the brain and neurochemistry and all this stuff. I'm actually for the, this would be probably the first time that people have seen me talk where I'm not going full Monty in the like chemical warfare and shit like that. I'm going straight into, okay, this is your client. This is how we create loops. This is how we break loops. This is how you slowly make wins and drive them the right direction. What happens when they relapse? So it was, it was a good refresher for me to go, Oh, you know, I should probably actually teach this more often. Yeah. I mean, I still would like to know. I'd like to hear the metabolism one again. I'm still talking about dopamine and stress and some other stuff too. For me, that would have been good. But I think, yeah, I'm looking forward to it tomorrow. See, when it comes to you learning, like you're learning now and in the past, would you say that your learning came from like professional, a desire for professional development or just a deep-seated personal interest in knowing more? Both, both because I was like, I was always that kid who would take things apart just to see what was in them. And then I couldn't put them back together. Luckily, my dad was a mechanic, so he could always put everything back together. But I would always take apart electronics. I would take anything, anything. I just wanted to see how it works. I would constantly try to reverse engineer things. So when I got into this industry, I'm like, OK, let's let's look at the big picture thing. I do this. OK, now what? What's actually happening inside the machine? Okay, let's go get a physiology textbook. Let's get a biochemistry textbook, and let's start reading through that and try to find what happens. What's the consequence? Because everything we do is cause and effect. The reason your clients are fucked up, there's an effect that you can see. It's measurable. What's the cause? And if you don't know what you're talking about, you're going to try to fix the wrong cause or a lower-level cause where we need to fix the higher, upper cause because everything trickles down. I'm trying to think of an example of like stuff that we've spoken about in mentorship and in practical application of this because this is fucking huge so if you don't know something as the coach then it's very difficult to look and see what's happening and have a because it's just educated guessing coaching in my opinion it's just educated guessing some people are just more educated shitting in your hand and throwing at the wall 100% but like slowly but surely you know which parts of the wall the shit sticks right that's it so if we look at like the first thing that comes to my head is like calcium or glute fog dependent um you know uh glucose translocation so we're looking at that i remember very clearly you explained to me about like uh insulin resistance post-workout and being like so you're just giving these people all this high carbohydrate and you're like how the fuck's getting in the cell and asking me to justify my decisions in my coaching back to you which always made me fucking like so fucking sweaty like i don't know but like i feel like uh Like an example like that, like maybe talk on that for a minute where it's like, if we use that as an example, if I don't know, you maybe break that down briefly, the translocation, the glucose transport, getting glucose into the cell, like we've got glute four, we've got calcium dependent, right? Yeah. So it like if there calcium dependent glute four translocation then it like I was trying to ramble the sugar into a client and get into their cells and you asked me to justify why I was giving say Chaz sugar post and you fucking destroyed me on my beliefs But without you doing that, I don't know why I'm making decisions. I'm making decisions based on dogma and basing it on fucking bodybuilding textbooks and magazines. So maybe that's a examples like to give like one practical example of like what you know and what you don't yeah well then sometimes you know sometimes you have to challenge people and they might be doing the right thing but you have to challenge them to figure out why they're doing that so you do it because you read in a bodybuilding magazine because what big soapbox issue for me is you have you'll have scientists that talk about being insulin resistant post-workout or insulin sensitive sensitive yeah insulin since post-workout but you're not you're actually insulin resistant post-workout but you are glucose sensitive which are two different things this is the thing you taught me and i was like what because what we need to understand when you when you train contract your muscle you are creating a stressful environment you're creating a stress response yeah what do you secrete when you create a stress response cataclysm and glucocorticoids cortisol adrenaline noradrenaline which does what catecholamines inherently desensitize the insulin receptors so if we look at it from it's a purely some semantic thing but semantics are important that's why i think it's a good example because it's like we can talk about carbs post-workout are good not because of the insulin issue but because you have good glucose transport because those are two different things so when you contract the muscle they're the calcium that create the calcium ions that create the yeah that movement makes cells accept glucose irrespective of insulin via calcium dependent exactly or we could also say if we didn't want to say like calcium we could say movement dependent uh glute for but this is the sort of thing that like i sat and maybe there's someone watching listening and they're like what the fuck are they talking about and that was how i felt but like i think your response next to that feeling is what will differentiate and not in every area because for me like there's certain areas i didn't get that excited about but finding some excitement and like oh there's more to know here yeah was where we went scratching away and then you tell me things like that and i'm like okay this is interesting and then we got into gdas and largely why you know now we're just like arming the insulin postman with a fucking sledgehammer but the door is still fucking closed it's not going into the cell that way bro like what would you learn in in bodybuilding you say okay you have high blood take gdas yep but my so my question now is why is the sugar high the cell doesn't want the sugar this that's the problem the cell has enough energy it doesn't want anymore it's trying it's trying to run through its processes and make more room so then you give a gda which slams it in there and there's always a consequence to everything you do both positive and negative so the with if we're going to go into physiology lesson like look at you it's it's looking at insulin resistance not as a bad thing necessarily but as a protective like a protective mechanism which is a good thing but it's it depends on the situation right so like post-workout insulin resistance is different than if someone's just morbidly obese and insulin resistant because someone who's morbidly obese can't manage the flow of energy so they have to put it somewhere else so fat cells right we're going to pop it there there is and that's what coaches have to understand is you have everything's on a continuum like the body isn't black and white it's 50 shades of gray so you can have a pathology on one side of the continuum and the other side of the continuum on one side it's actually a bad physiological response the other side it's an inevitable positive response but this is all the reverse engineering this is the taking things apart putting them back together again i've got high blood sugar okay but why where's it backing up where's it meant to go where do we want it to go you know all all that kind of stuff is super important i think we can apply this back to training as well so like there's obviously there's that we've just gone down a big biochemistry hole but we come back out of that and then go into another hole so to speak uh we trained earlier on thanks for noticing guys we have we do sick pump um what the pump tank we just did arms but like we amended exercises let's talk about like the a1 a2 a3 that we did earlier on right and like why did you choose those exercises so like explain what they were explain why we did them and like the amendments and adjustments that we made along the way because i think this is another example of understanding this is the stuff i fucking creamed over as a coach it was like biochemistry and then like the programming and manipulations and stuff so run us through a182a3 and why we change things along the way okay so we we had you said we have limited time we got in and out like 30 minutes we gonna be on camera we gonna be on camera we need to get a juicy pump okay so if we if we have limited time we need to make make a something that a bit more efficient so it's not like we're gonna be able to go on and do like 20 sets of stuff would have loved to we'll love to but we just it's the time constraints okay well what works good in that well we'll do a tri set so now we have a lot of different options for tri sets let's do i i want to do something fun i hardly ever trained my arms let's do something fun so i'm like okay what's an unusual way of doing it so we could do 6 12 25 we could have done a lot of different stuff you got mechanical advantage 6 12 25 in your arms yeah because you said uh you were asking me in the workout is like a mechanical advantage thing i'm like kind of sort of it's more of a an old school steve holman iron man magazine positions of flexion style workout which in those workouts they would do a mid-range movement which would be more of your heavy power movement so there's not a lot of stretch there's not a lot of shortened position it's basically the load is is in the middle of the movement so it's really good for like big like heavy stuff start with a seated seated curl so we're seated incline curls not first seat not incline we only had an incline high incline but it was we just say seated curl right so we do that hit an am reps six to eight reps so then i like in the original uh in the original iron man stuff they would go mid-range lengthen position shortened position yeah now i prefer doing it a different way i like doing the mid-range going to a short position and then getting a big pump then going to the lengthen position and trying to do praying to any god that is available exactly and like really just ripping the shit out of it because we have like three sets of that three sets the triceps we're kind of done so mid-range position seated then lower the bench flip over spider curls get a little shoulder flexion elbow flexion we move into a short position and the gravitational load is short position get a really nasty pump same incline flip over and get in a really deep stretch position and then finish it out for sure so like let's look at the adjustments So if I'm on the first exercise, A1, we're doing seated curl, there's not really a huge amount of adjustment that took place there. We were supinate and fine, no problem. But when we moved to spider curls, you brought my elbows forward, you changed my neck and thoracic position, and you asked for a little bit more elbow flexions throughout the movement as well. Why? So if we look at the biceps, they're biarticular. So they cross both the shoulder and the elbow. so the whole goal of this and the hypertrophy bros are going to argue me and go it's just active insufficiency like it's like that's a bad thing it when you try to contract the muscle at both joints it's going to get crampy it's going to get pumpy the whole point the whole point of that movement in the a2 is to get pumpy and there's nothing that's it basically so it's like if we bring this forward and up we get pumpy real fucking fast and we get in gorge of blood really quickly. Now you were going like flexing and bringing the head down. Yeah. So head up, extending the thoracic spine. Yeah. Get in a better extended position, keep the spine in position and look up. And the reason is when you look down, it can potentially close off the nerve slightly, which can lower the strength going through the elbow flexors. Right. So, and also, So we're coming out the neck and we're going basically under the clavicle and over the first rib. So if you go here and you impinge, it's not going to pinch everybody, but there's a high likelihood it can, especially in that position. If you create any type of partial impingement of that nerve, it's going to reduce the amount of output you can get through biceps. So if we can get extended and keep the head up, that will give us a small percentage of extra strength in that position. we should probably clarify head up neutral spine not head up not looking up yeah it's not flexed c-spine it was neutral basically head up in the neutral position extension of t-spine and and you know um neutral c-spine is what we effectively did there fine and then we moved into went into an incline and then as we went through we kept dropping the incline into as close as we could get to what what we used to call like back in the day physical culture history at lazy man's curl which is basically they get on a high bench flat high bench flat so they can get in a lot of shoulder extension and then go from that so you get a massive stretch long lengthened position stretch like fuck and not many reps I'm embarrassed to say but still something and then we move to triceps same kind of vibe where flat dumbbell skull crushes for the sake of layman's terms into decline into decline same thing but a declined position, and then we moved into overhead French press.

cable for inch press. Basically the same thing. Big mid-range position. The original intent, we were going to stay all on dumbbells, and you were like, hey, there's a cable over there. I'm like, well, fuck, that's perfect. That's actually better anyways. So do the flat bench, mid-range position, then go into a decline. And in the decline position, since we're upside down, that is going to reinforce the load being more in the short position. Then to amplify that, we bring our elbows back, so you're pushing this direction, which makes it god-awful hard to get all the way up. I was shaking like a shitting dog, and I lost my right arm at one point. So did you. Both of us lost it. And the French press, realistically for me, and then it's good to know this stuff as well as a coach. We know that my external rotation is shit. So for me to get here is very, very difficult, right? But now we can use the load to pull you into a little bit more stretch. And over time, if you continue doing that, your shoulders will get better. Open it up. space yeah and then we then the nasty one on the last one we did the uh we started doing cali presses so as many concentric as you can and then kind of rolling eccentric triceps extension but these are changes that i think coaches need to know and have this stuff in your in your and i think this is why actually seeing some time in the gym is lab time with with friends colleagues industry industry mates um is super super important um and then obviously you spoke to sarah about the hamstring curl stuff as well. We were talking about hamstring curls with the Saz and Chaz. Remember that discussion? Yeah. Might be worth touching on that super quickly just to give another example of what was going on in the gym and amendments and everything else when we're talking about... I think a lot of coaches just need to know these little manipulations you can make while we're doing it. Remember toes? Yeah. Give us that example. It's another good example. One thing they need to know is when it's okay to do this stuff and when it's not. Because, like you said... Well, when is it? There was a time where we were going and we completely lost our right arms and the dumbbell fell. With a client, that's fucking dangerous. Yeah, so there's like a more advanced client. There you go. You could do that, but you wouldn't do that with Mary Muffintop on her first fucking session. I was going to say those words if you did. It's like we keep it. I need to put this on a sticker. I need you to tell me how to do this. I'll show you. Keep it simple until it needs to be complex, right? So if the simple thing works, why would you make it overly complex? so it's like the irony is is when you're better you can make simple complex the better you get the more complex you can make simple correct because our workout was not fucking complex no it wasn't complicated at all it was real simple shit and little small tweaks so when you put them on the hamstring curl yeah and you Sarah's feet are like this I'll point to the camera and what do you do with her feet so we turn the toes in right okay so so basically when we look at we're going to get cramp as we do this let's just do it anyway we look at where the hamstrings are right you have a the the three the three major hamstrings we'll be looking at semimembranosus tendinosis and the long head biceps they all originate the same part ischiotuberosity or the sit bone the semimembranosus tendinosis run that's your medial hamstrings that's what's considered that long head is a lateral that most people will almost always bias towards the lateral head because they almost always do a duck foot So if we want to balance that out well we turn the toes in A you find out how weak people are and how fucked people are when they try and internally and they can they can actually turn they can't actually turn the tibia inside right and then you'll see too as they go through their feet will will they'll start to do this they'll start rotating apart was not chaz's feet whose feet was it cero's yeah someone's feet kept breaking yeah like chaz doesn't have a problem with it because most of the stuff he has problems it's just not that one it's just not that one and that was the first time he's ever done that so he's like i never do leg curls you know i'm a crossfit king he's not a bro yeah he's not a bro but he's one he's a bro honorary but the thing is the stuff that he would be doing in crossfit already biases that medial hamstring because they're doing a lot of hinging they're doing a lot of arty i was doing a lot of a lot of olympic weightlifting so a lot of that stuff is already biasing opposite of what most people do because most people get on the leg curl and only bias one side but then we saw the other side of that because that's a benefit to chas on the hamstring curl but we said the opposite of that when we did the glute kickback machine and chas was incapable but he's too tall but not incapable less capable of using his glute because his erectors are so fucking strong his bias from the hinges the lifting that he does in crossfit actually then impeded his ability to engage just glute and that's the joke that chas and i have in every fucking bodybuilding gym we ever go to is chas is like i find this hilarious that these are exercises and machines for one muscle which isn't always true but largely versus crossfit it is so what was going on there he's in the kickback and his erectors are fucking like on and he's not getting the same out his glutes what's going on yeah because basically what we want in that position is to try to keep a little bit of a hollow ab so keep the abs on and then posteriorly rotate the hips a little bit and then just try to isolate the femur going into extension so which is is completely out of tempo with what he usually does because everything's extension so because the the meaty erectors every time he tries to extend through the femur his lower back wants to extend so it wants to bring his hips around his cns is ripping a bar off the floor at that moment but it's just it's just motor patterning right yep which is what i said this year is all just like uh connecting with with the muscle and i think this i mean dude i can talk about this for fucking months and like with sarah when she's going and she's i'm like okay just when you're in this position you realistically only have around maybe 15 degrees of femur uh extension so you don't actually want to extend your knee fully if you want to keep it in your glute so round one like do you feel it yeah cool round two she goes why did i feel that in the knee i said because you went beyond that and you started using your You need to push the rest out. When I said it, she turned it into a leg press. Yeah, like an inverted leg press. It became leg extension because the knee was extending the back end of the rep, which if we're sitting in a leg extension to target the quad, what are we doing? We're extending the knee. So she is at the back end of the rep, not finishing here. It's finishing here. And as a result, why am I feeling this in my quad? And the thing is, that's not a bad thing. That's a totally legit exercise to finish up with your knee. However, if we wanted to minimize the action of the knee and maximize the glute Then we don't want to use the knee because we were already doing leg leg press. Anyways What the goal of this exercise what the goal the workout Here one more to finish on Because we mentioned Chaz our resident crossfitter The only crossfitter in the room I don't know if he's loaded or not. Why do crossfitters get injured, in your opinion? I mean, every competition you're going to have injuries. As someone that's worked in a box, crossfitters get injured more than the people in the bodybuilding part. I think there is a more extreme kind of viewpoint for CrossFit. And look, some of the pairings and the way they do things, like some of the higher rep snatches and some of the way they put exercise together, from a logical standpoint, doesn't make sense. but from a you know i guess surviving the zombie apocalypse or whatever they say and like being like resilient robust and be able to do crazy shit it makes sense for crossfit makes no sense in bodybuilding like i don't agree with it because like i'm such a i'm such so finicky with my program design that i would that's why i never write people crossfit workouts i'm like i'm not a crossfit coach like i don't know how to do that i i can write structured workouts where order of exercises and the way you do things make logical sense but some sports don't make sense so so you look at the training and the training looks like it doesn't make sense but the training is done that way because the competition is done differently doesn't make it bad it makes it different no i i totally agree and i think like we could go down a hole on i could go on a big rabbit hole of crossfit and scalability and that's one of one of the problems they have is they you can't learn how to olympic weight lift the fucking pvc pipe i'm sorry and i think it's also it's not even just cross it's the people that go to crossfit because they go to crossfit and they want to do the cool shit right now and don't realize it takes some time to learn how to lift with snatches and cleans in a way where it's efficient and it's effortless and you minimize injury expand i want I don't know more about this. Well, it's a very technical lift. All lifts are technical. The only thing that's not that technical is machines because... Good. I'm glad you've gone here. Yeah. Because with a machine, the machine provides the constraints. Stability largely as well. External stability, you know, kind of a set movement pathway. Parameters for what you can and can't do. But for bodybuilding, that's great because you can go full Monty and you can work prime movers. You don't have to worry about all the stabilizers. You don't have to worry about center of mass. You don't have to worry about a lot. You can just go fucking full potato. But now you go to something like Olympic weightlifting, highly technical. Yes. And there's a definite very right way of doing it and a very wrong way of doing it. And that right way is going to be different depending on who you learned it from. Did you learn like Eastern Bloc style? Did you learn, you know, Russian? Are you doing Chinese weightlifting? They all have their own different ways of how they move the bar from the ground to overhead. Yeah, to do a bodybuilding machine wrong is still to do it right. Pretty much. Yeah, as long as you can fit if you long as you put the settings right way that you were meant to be Sat in it and using it for its actual purpose wrong is only so wrong. Whereas in CrossFit. It's like there is infinite There no there less parameter We moving the bar which is like I took charge to where did we go You and me and Ben went to Flex Lewis place in Dragon's Lair in Vegas. And we got him on the plate loaded chest press and he was like, for starters, he was like, why the fuck are we doing another set? We've done like all the reps here. But Chaz kept standing up in the chest press because he wants to make everything a fucking free moving, full body movement. I mean, we could talk about this all day, but I feel like for now, try not to melt anyone's brain any further. So separate conversation about this again. With the Olympic weightlifting, it's you and anything that is, I'd say, like a three-dimensional type of thing. You have to provide your own constraints. So your brain has to figure out how to make the constraints. You have to know what they were in the first place. That's right. Whereas a machine provides a constraint, a squat, front squat, clean, snatch. You have to create your own stabilization, internal stabilization, connection, your own patterns. so that everything is a place right so they're vastly different they're all exercises but they're very different in the demands that they need to do like if you're doing a snatch you're you're never doing your your muscles aren't going to be on fire you go and you do a hack squat to failure for 15 reps everything's going to be on fire it's completely different metabolic demands completely different technically different ways in which you will fail in that movement between a metabolic issue versus a neurological or strength or technique issue. So that is one of the gripes I have is they, there's not the people that go, that start CrossFit. A lot of them want to get into the groups and do their thing, but they don't want to do the prep work to understand how to do the movement correctly. It's like when I was in high school, like I was in all the honors, honors English, honors math, whatever. Can't relate. I was not. I had the worst algebra teacher for algebra one and two where he would not check your homework. He would just take it and put a check mark if he saw that you just squiggled shit all over it. When I got to college, they're like, I took entrance exams. I go, you actually don't know how to do algebra. I'm like, yeah, math's not my thing. English is my thing. And they're like, yeah, you can't go in algebra one. We got to put you in retard algebra. So I actually had to go. Algebra. I was in university. I had to take like high school level algebra test after taking it for two years and still not knowing A minus B equals C. Which isn't ideal. So that's what like a thing where it's technical lifts, you need basically your fucking retard. It's a stacking of meta skills. You've got to build the foundation. I'm resistant to every urge in my fucking body because I'm aware of time. I think we should wrap up because I want to just, I could fucking keep playing tennis with you all day on this. I love this. This is my happy place. but I'm going to resist that for now we'll do another one in a bit but I just want to thank you appreciate you coming and sharing and chatting shit thank you for all the help along the way thank you my brother from another mother yes sir guys if you've enjoyed it leave a comment let us know what you found from it let us know what was helpful ask questions if you want and above all else if you want to find Luke don't find him personally find Muscle Nerds Education on Instagram Muscle Nerds underscore education personally is not going to be the place you're not going to get where you came looking for on his personal account. And don't forget to whop the subscribe button if you liked it. We'll see you on the next one. See you.