Special Guest Feature - The Muscle Nerd Himself

# Special Guest Feature - The Muscle Nerd Himself

**Channel:** Matter Athletica
**Published:** 2025-03-25
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlN_7WwP26s

G'day listeners and welcome back to another very special episode of the matter mentality podcast where we talk all things training nutrition and psychology to maximize your performance. today i am joined by the muscle nerd himself there is a title of the business is applicable as an adjective to him is a descriptor really and probably something is the reason why we align so much is they're pretty much the same way the big luke lehman how are we doing brother i'm good i'm good i'm so glad for my wife i was in the middle of a workout she goes you know you have a podcast in 30 minutes i was like oh shit so i had to rush home after after looking at like the the back and forth or like the the back ends and the about me and stuff in your business the amount that you and zoe are just me and brooklyn 10 years in the future is hilarious it is the fucking thing when i look through it i'm like your whole family was just like i'm the ideas guy i think on stuff and then send it to zoe it was like yeah back to our inbox from like 10 years but what six years ago and i'm like hey i've got this idea about a blog i've got this idea about this research got this idea about a concept and i'm like go do something with that yeah man yeah if i didn't have zoe nothing would ever get done like big i'm big picture i've died this guy but i can't get it i can't make it happen without her so it's a it's a very humble humble uh i guess honesty to have is like we know we do we know we bring the table yeah everybody's got to have their role exactly there's no point us both doing the same thing if we can both develop it what's the point she does the fancy shit i just i say the stuff yeah i mean that's the the first uh first big rule of business hire people that are good at shit you're bad at like that's how you run a business you don't you don't need another you you need somebody who fills the gaps in the shit that you hate doing or you can't actually do better than somebody else literally like i'm horrible at making content i can write the shit out of it i'll write a four-word blog on a single post but making it pretty and look good i got nothing on that so she can go she does the canberra like youtube edits and the snippets like we got like a five thousand dollar camera gifted so she learned how to edit vlogs and videos so that we can do youtube content i was like that's a you stuff i'll do the talking you can do that stuff my wife doesn't do technical stuff it's not her thing that's like i still do that type of stuff but uh because i enjoy it kind of video editing could be really fucking frustrating Yeah, I think I tried it. I was like, my limit was like CapCut. And I was like, back when we weren't both doing this full time, I was like, oh, CapCut, I'll just make something for like a training montage. It was like, add this here and some audio. I'm like, fuck this. The good thing is you can use AI now and it'll do it all for you. Yeah. I think that's going to be a great part of this chat we get into is like, AI's role in coaching business now, because that's going to be fantastic. But we're going to ramble all day. What I really want to get started with is, I think, and this is going to be a really important uh foundation for the rest of the conversation you guys started a very similar position to us and it's probably going to echo a lot across this conversation which i think people will appreciate in that you both had this idea you know the muscle nerd it was a page that was kind of made about you which i think is hilarious and yeah that sort of led to this idea of you guys being like well you'd be like hey let's do this full time and then literally just handed that to zoe was like yeah let's go let's go make that a thing what does that look like register the ASIC, do the foundation, set up the tax. I don't know how much of it she did and you did, but it was basically just like muscle nodes. No, that was all her. And kind of the backstory of that was when I, so I worked for Poliquin Group for a long time as an assistant. And then they hired me to come on full time. And I was talking to another colleague of mine who was working there for a few years. And he goes, listen, because I was like, is this a good idea? because I have to move from Texas to Rhode Island. So I'm moving from the second largest state in my home state to the smallest state in America around a culture of people that I don't really understand, right? Because we're all cowboys and shit and we're conservatives. And then now I'm going into like massively liberal territory. And so I'm like, okay, so, and it's cold there. It's cold. It's like it fucking snows and it doesn't stop. And I'm not built for that shit. So I called him. I was like, what do you think? He goes, yeah, you should 100% do it. But just I'm going to give you some advice, have a plan B, because everyone eventually gets fired from here, whether they deserve it or not And I was like okay that that not very positive But all right I tried to get this job for like seven years So let do it So I started muscle nurse kind of on the back end as my plan B just in case something happened And then when I met Zoe and I told her about this immediately we met when I was teaching in Sydney And we were kind of doing the long distance thing for a few months before she came over. And I said, look, I'd really like to get this started. She immediately like started registering stuff, built me a web page, like all like register web page, all this shit. And I'm like, oh, who is this girl? What the hell? And then when I left Pollack and group, then we were like, OK, well, I guess it's now plan B. It's a I eventually got let go for stupid reasons that I didn't find out about until almost a year later. And I was like, all right, good. He was right. We have a plan B. He got fired first. Then I got let go and then everybody else either let go or abandoned ship. but then we had that because we didn't have any she had quit both of her jobs and sold her car to fly to america to see me and uh and now we're like great neither of us have a job we don't have any money we don't even know how we're going to get back to australia and then then we announced that i had left and we got inundated with people who wanted us to do seminars so our first seminar guy in kuwait said hey i'll pay you to come to kuwait and teach at our private club for our 30 coaches i was like dill but you have to get me from there and my girlfriend from there to australia and he goes done easy and that's how we started just hearing the just hearing the she built the website and started registering stuff a gift to when i quit no sorry a gift to when i was like it's time to start building this out because i was so done with the job i had like i was running businesses for nutrition warehouse supplement stores and i was like it just was not stopping fulfilling i was like when it's about helping people more about like how many sales you make i was like i'm over this already i was running three or four stores i'm like i'm tired of this and she knew it and i was like in the next three to four years i have to go and it became like a once i decided three to four years i was like fucking one or 12 months and then once it was 12 months i was like why not just now and just do it and then she's like oh by the way here's a gift there's a website that we have with all our stuff on it i was like yeah well done i like Well done. She understands me. I can appreciate it. I have to move slowly. My head goes a thousand miles an hour. You just have to keep up. Yeah, 100%. But that's a really important question I think that's going to start off this conversation is between the pair of us, obviously there is two very intimate dynamics between relationship and personal life. A lot of our listeners are new beginners, business owners. They're in relationships. And a lot of mentors that I've had over the years, a lot of business mentors I've had, have played the be cautious of intimacy in business, be careful of personal and professional. How did you guys find that immediate interaction of like, we've both got nothing, so this has to work, but also it's a new relationship, it's a new dynamic in and of itself, and you're throwing a business into it, and it's a business that you're passionate about, but there's no guarantee it pays off. How did that start? Did you have faith in it straight away? There's obviously going to be rough patches. We had faith in it straight away just because we had so much business right out the gate. Right. So it's like, uh, somebody, people look at us like, no, they're an overnight success. I'm like, no, no, no. I worked on this for 25 years before we got here. And so, yeah, it was a 25 year overnight success. Uh, but you know, nothing's guaranteed. Like you could, you could shoot out like a rocket and then it could fizzle out really quickly. And so because we got thrown into the deep end, we didn't have a choice. So it's, it's either sink or swim. So that was all, that was all good because we had the business already, like we had business coming to us already. So we had like cash options, but it was hard at first because we work very differently. Like she is incredibly organized, incredibly structured, makes a diary, follows a diary. And I'm not because I I'm one of the original ADD kids that got diagnosed when it was just now a thing. And I don't work, my brain doesn't work like that. Like I'm just kind of all over the place and I have no structure and I just get shit done when I get it done. And you know, I'm working on too many projects at one time where she can streamline herself and I can't. So there was a period at first where she had to learn how my brain operates in order to accept that. And then in order to learn how to drive me the right direction. So I didn't like go off in the bush. Yeah. She watched a lot of podcasts on ADD and ADHD and kind of got an idea about, okay, so he does have this condition. So yeah, he can't really help it. Like this is just the way it goes, But OK what are the benefits of that Well he has a crazy memory active recall He can simplify complex subjects He can see things in patterns that other people can see because their brains aren wired like that All right How do we leverage that How do I work with that So we did It took it took a good year and a half before we got into a good flow And then we figured out who what each person role was So then I would be I doing this and then I pass it off to you Right And then she gets it done And then if she needs something she comes to me you got to get this done Okay Boom Right So you basically like realistically you guys started creating SOPs for how to handle your brain. Yeah. It's basically, yeah, we had to have, it was up to her to create a structure of how we get everything out of my head and actually get it online or get it into a course right so i just i just had she knows if she nags me nothing gets done but if she just pushes me in the right direction a little bit and lets me do it and then schedules things for me it gets done yeah yeah it's a lot of work on her it's it's a hilarious conversation it's like looking 15 years in the future the so uh our ta actually our va is actually brooklyn's mom we brought her in because it was like my schedule's getting so busy between preps uni work business clients send a lot of presentations i was like i can't manage all this like i need to offload some of that work and it was literally like she sat down to teach her mom how to work with me they were having conversations about how to figure me out she's like oh how does ben enjoy his calendar does it be color coding or like numbers numerical is it structured by time blocking blah blah so it's like literally having to take that and put it into a structured concept that could be like this is how you manage that person and it's like that made the flow of our business so much more streamlined effective because yeah i would just have like i think there's like 40 different blogs waiting in our like written content list that i've just done or written and she brooklyn's this on a page okay basically just goes through days where she's like i'll do 10 now and then 10 later on but like she's always a step like our advice was basically make sure that she's a step behind me so that my like my ideas and brains continually push her and she she has to pull up stuff that basically just sounds like you yeah times 10 what's what's nice when i'm medicated i'm okay the problem is like it's fucking difficult for me to get my medication in australia they don't want to give it to me so it's like i don't think i don't think the government here or the doctors understand this condition it's like my original gp for like four years was prescribing what i've been taking since 2011 and everything was fine then all of a sudden they go you can't have that you got to go to a psychiatrist to get a psychiatrist takes like nine months. I'm like, I don't think you understand. Like you say, I need to go to a psychiatrist. I don't think you understand in this ADD brain. I'm like, yeah, I need to go to a psychiatrist. Four months later, I haven't even investigated this. So we're in the process of getting her to find me a doctor and get the appointment. So I'll actually go. So I get medicated. It's so much better. It's so much better when, when that's happening, but you know, you just you just got to deal with what consequences you got you have like what uh what diet what the dice have rolled you just have to roll with it so do you consider it like let's like in regards to business and what you do i've seen people refer to it in many particular ways but i've seen that there was an interview with michael phelps and he referred to adhd as a superpower it allowed him to hyper focus not to fix it gets like yeah in the areas he sucked he didn't want to touch but the areas where he excelled it was like i'm going to just do this and fucking nail it and win nine gold medals in one season of olympics like do you look at it as something similar to like that where it's like rather playing that victim mentality business being like oh i can never get it finished because i'm so distracted it's more so leaning into what it is which is a very handy tool for what it is useful and just kind of like excelling from that i think you what he's saying is isn't not true but there's an there's a bad side to it as well right so and this is this what i try to tell i mean i've got a lot of everybody in the fitness industry is getting getting add now and i'm like man i don't think you guys understand like it's being over over prescribed so you're just distracted like true true attention deficit disorder is not being distracted you it's true you can get really hyper focused on one thing the only problem is everything else in your life just goes to fucking shambles so like you can't get anything else done because you're only obsessing about that one thing and then you know you start juggling too many balls and you can't keep track of all the balls you can only keep track of one ball so it's there there are times where it's a it's a massive benefit but to like that one thing but to everything else in your life it's you're an absolute fucking train wreck yeah yeah i think that's like even from a cyclist that i we spoke a little bit about these sort of topics when I was at IOPC a couple of years back, but the psych realm, I think has become such a trend topic now where everyone has to have some sort of terminology, diagnosis, pathology, or on some sort of spectrum that I think it's completely watered down what it means to actually have these things. Like what it used to mean, like actual ADHD or ADD 20 years ago is now just someone that sporadically distracted and bored in what they do in life and just going oh I don actually want to research this paper write this program I have ADHD I should want to do that It like you just don find it exciting You working with people you don enjoy It it it it's weird that with all the different social media platforms, we see this linear relationship with people with ADD, but you're just fucking distracted. You're just wanting to be on social media instead of doing what you need to do. And that's why I have to govern that stuff. Like I don't really get on social media except when I'm taking a shit. That's when you see all the memes posted on my personal page. but other than that i only get on social media to check messages i don't even do our posts zoe does all that stuff because i'm not a i don't scroll i'd rather try to funnel my thing into reading a textbook and making notes and creating stuff but and that keeps me from getting overly distracted but i think yeah i the number of people i've heard in the last few weeks they go yeah i started getting on ritalin or adderall or vivance and i feel amazing i got so much work done i'm like you're taking an amphetamine. That doesn't mean you have ADD. Everybody feels amazing when they take an amphetamine. That's why cocaine is so popular. If you snorted a line of Coke or meth, you would feel amazing and you get a lot of shit done. That's what stimulants, that's what they do. But I think what matters is what's your life like everywhere else without them. And so mine is like crazy going from these, these periods of being somewhat normal to being completely fucking manic and just doing weird impulse shit that doesn't make any sense. And I don't even know why I'm fucking doing it. Right. And when, when I'm on the, when I'm on Vyvanse, that's my choice because it's steady. There's, there's, I don't have a come down and I can, people are calling me going, how do you sleep on these drugs? I'm like, I don't have, I can take, I can take Ritalin to go to sleep. It doesn't affect my brain the same as it does yours because my shit's wired differently. And I've done genetic tests for it and issues with dopamine, making dopamine, transporting dopamine and dopamine receptor affinity. it's like that is a classic case of okay a stimulant will actually create like calmness in my brain where it actually promotes a stimulant quality in other people's brains and i think that's the big the big difference but zoe can tell because uh when i'm when i'm when i'm actually on medication i try not to take it too early i'll try to get as much shit as i can while i'm still a little bit sleepy and on coffee and then i'll take it but it only lasts eight hours for me so she knows about six or seven o'clock in the evening i'm gonna come down and that's when i get real fucking weird what's weird weird saying weird shit and doing weird shit and she thinks it's funny she's like i like when you're not medicated it's hilarious i'm like yeah but i could get more work done if i was actually like at least for 12 hours of the day somewhat normal somewhat normal i think it's a big problem in in our games everyone like because research is so available and yes open open source you know publications and you can go to like i think it's like uh there's a pump c now where it's like you can download basically whatever study you want if you have like a university access you go to pub man and all that sort of stuff everyone's so free to read information but they don't understand or know how to interpret it we're getting so many people not even comprehending or understanding neuropharmacology or psychopharmacology and just being like oh i had a positive reaction to this and it is really prevalent in the health industry because they all think they understand from doing a pt course they understand neuro anatomy brain function and neuro and endocrine systems like no i'm definitely adhd i felt better on this drug and you realize like you just said there there's a neurochemical responsive difference between you and that person it's not just a a perception or feeling we're not talking about like uh gender sex spectrums where it's like i feel different you physiologically are neurologically different in the brain compared to someone else the way you respond to dopamine the way you produce dopamine the way your receptors respond to dopamine the way the the thing that dopamine does the interaction between adenosine versus stimulus and epinephrine it's such a different mechanism compared to someone who's like i took this drug and all of a sudden i felt fantastic for you know six to twelve hours it was work done that's great you just benefit from amphetamines but that the actual clinical differences uh it's it's it's a neurological structural difference not oh i feel a certain way yeah that couldn't describe basically most of the fitness industry at the moment any better is how much everybody thinks they interpret information understand because it applies to them yeah but they actually have no idea what they're looking at no not at all i mean it's any stimulant's going to make you feel better that doesn't mean it's fixing a problem like when i take when i take an add medication i don't get hyped up i get calm Yeah. Now there's a, there's, if I take enough of it, I will. So like if I'm taking 70 milligrams of advance and I go, I'll take one 50. Now I can feel what everybody else feels, which I'm like, this is great. But at like 60, 70 milligrams, I'm just like super calm. It's like I almost took a like a Xanax. But I'm always telling these guys, I'm like, listen, have you ever done cocaine? And everybody in the fucking fitness industry's done cocaine. And they're like, I like, did you feel better when you snorted?

a line of cocaine i felt amazing i'm like okay you're just taking basically a pill of that like oh no wonder i feel good i'm like yeah no one ever says i felt bad after a bump of cocaine except maybe australian cocaine just mostly baby laxative that's why you do a line you have to take a shit and the the amount that i i know that it's fucking it's like speed mixed with ketamine mixed with something else it's like if your cocaine is giving you away for 24 straight hours it's not cocaine. You should not be feeling this 12 hours later. I mean, like I can't sleep for the entire night. It's like, that's not cocaine. You just took someone's meth. Basically. You just took whatever they, whatever they had, whatever they scraped off the floor. 1% cocaine and methamphetamine. The hilarious one I used to work at Nutrition Warehouse, this guy would rock up this really like, like when you picture a rich Persian man, he's driving in a Lamborghini, rocks up in like a purple, like just absolute peacock, comes in in a suit and buys two kilos of creatine i'm like oh working out today buddy yes i'm working out today it's like yeah yeah sure that's what you're doing that's the the muscle muscle growth pre-workout but actually moving on to two topics of conversation there that i really want to get into that will be we side rail ourselves completely at all times um one of the big things that you have become i don't say proficient in prolific in basically big pushing um is this concept i think is really important about listeners uh moving past the business chat is the preparation for physique preparation now we have a very similar concept and it's something that i think is advanced quite quite well in the industry of physique coaching and what used to be back in the day was basically take a whole bunch of drugs build up your off season get fat as you know throw out your your heart rate throw out your blood pressure ruin every blood marker you have and then go well i'm going to cut down now anyway so who cares and then you go straight into a comp prep for 12 to 16 weeks take more drugs more stimulants take something maybe for blood pressure try keep it down maybe something for a liver protection because you're just running a whole bunch of orals and that's usually your six month window for most people six to eight month window coming to a show and the start to the season you finish up a massive growth block nothing for your health look at no screening protocols and then go into prep take more drugs completely throw your body out and then basically come out of that wondering why your body's fucking pissing yellow and you feel like shit you guys push a a push very early actually if we go back to looking at things like under the bar podcasts and we look at uh table talk uh lead fts um that approach that it's important to pre-prep your preparation you guys about this a fair while ago which is fantastic because it wasn't i don't think up until recently it was a very understood concept it's not something that a lot of coaches have really comprehended and dialed in on how did you get to this what led to your like when you're looking at this going it is actually important we get someone ready if you're going to do a physique contest we need to pre-prep that and inside that pre-prep i'm going to throw a few questions that you get uh inside that pre-prep sort of uh phase for you guys are you looking at like social uh psychosocial ecological call it environmental or are you just looking more like the physique pre-preparation or the body we're we're really looking at both so i'll tell you it's like uh maybe like 20 yeah about 10 years ago 2015 i did a talk at swiss in canada and the whole talk was the concept that we created called prepping the prep because part of the issues that we saw from the from the guy side so we'll have to talking about both sides like guys versus girls right so the guys like you said they go into a prep and they just start throwing all this shit in but they weren't actually ready to start their prep because their blood their stage two hypertension they got a 95 to 100 resting heart rate yeah like you're gonna throw things in that's gonna fuck with your blood it's gonna fuck with your heart rate it's gonna fuck with your blood pressure you're already in pretty bad shape physiologically. So before you do that, why don't we get you actually healthy enough to start your prep? And one of the concepts was don't don't like what's the traditional way that we would use cardio in a contest prep, you start at 20 minutes, three days a week, and then you go to 25, three days a week, and then you go to five days at 20 a week. And then you just slowly build it up to a crescendo at the end, because you're trying to you're basically creating a caloric funnel so you don't have to diet as hard right and there's nothing inherently wrong with that it works i mean do you want to diet on 1600 calories or would you rather do a little bit of cardio diet on 2000 yeah that's the big thing now i looked at it and said you guys got this all wrong you should be front loading your cardio and doing it for the adaptations first so before let's say you going to do a 24 week prep spend the spend 12 weeks and start at 36 get your cardio going right then because all of the adaptation you get from that is going to carry you through really well because you going to build up more mitochondria the mitochondria is going to be burning more energy it's going to bring your blood pressure down bring your heart rate down it's going to make you sleep better it's going to help with your blood values it's going to help with all this stuff that's going to allow you to then push yourself a little bit harder so we look at a framework of starting off with say eight to 12 weeks of just aerobic work. Like doesn't have to be anything crazy, but do your list or your mess, get all your values where they need to be. Then if you're going to start, are you going to do hypertrophy? If you're going to go into hypertrophy phase, we obviously don't want to do a lot of cardio at that point, but we do want some maintenance, right? So don't eliminate the cardio all the way, but you don't need a high amount of cardio to maintain it. The hard part is getting there. The easy part's maintenance, right? so then you have this kind of prepping the prep phase where you get your values right and then whatever your next phase is going to be maybe it's hypertrophy so okay go to a couple of days a week of your cardio just dedicate and your steps that'll maintain it and then when you start your actual prep then you can start low and then build that high at that point so we go from a level of using cardio as an adaptation then using cardio at the end to now you act as a caloric funnel it makes more sense you recover better you're going to cover between sets between sessions better but when we started talking about everybody's like you're full of shit cardio is going to make you weak and fat you it the interference effect i'm like bro the interference if none of you motherfuckers are actually at a level where the interference effect is going to make that much of a difference my intel signaling oh god what are you gonna it's gonna fuck up like 1.2 percent of your gains well you're taking fucking three grams of gear who shit at least you won't have a heart attack like it's like broderick chavez says you know it's really bad for performance having fucking heart attack and dying like right on i remember i was sitting in a seminar of his and um and uh dean mckillop was putting it on and i remember that yeah yeah dean and i are good friends and he said hey do your cardio talk and i'm sitting in the back going oh like this is a guy notorious for pushing the the limits of drug use and hypersomnia this isn't gonna go one of two ways he's either gonna say do your cardio or he's gonna go fuck cardio fuck cardio and he got up there and did this whole rant on stop being idiots do your cardiovascular conditioning stop calling it cardio call it cardiovascular conditioning and don't fucking die and i was like fucking right on man i like that that's it but i've i've noticed it's like i remember you probably noticed it too remember it from back i reckon probably 10 15 years ago there was like this big hashtag team no cardio it was like the memes got hashtag fuck cardio it was like but it wasn't me there was actual coaches pushing this idea that doing cardio not doing cardio to prep was a brag and not like i get my guys lean without cardio and i'm like cool what's their blood markers like what's the values like what's the valves looking like what's their fucking cholesterol markers looking like what's their what are these combined factors showing us where you're bragging about having done no cardio to get lean or just a diet but you're only looking at the the output variable of going i got the lean through deficiency through deficit like the deficit of food but we're not looking at the long-term health values of this individual the the heart function like you added a whole bunch of compounds that increase stress function on the heart the decreased functionality the valves the block the valves are going to increase pressure through them and then going yeah but i didn't do any cardio with this prep and i've been a big proponent of for a long time in my guys programming is especially if it's someone that i know that i'm going to enhance that they want to compete and that they want to run off season uh sorry that they want to come into a show at least three days a week 20 minutes 120 to 130 bpm just something consistently easy like that you know level two where it's like a phase two so we're not looking at anything drastically intense that we're going to disrupt signaling or interfere with any sort of growth signaling but it's enough where like i'm going to give you an extra five years since we're playing with things we're going to potentially pull down five years can we give you that five years back in another factor which is your heart health yeah and with that you're going to have a greater proficiency for oxidation you're going to have a greater proficiency for aerobic recovery which means you have a greater proficiency recovery between sets which means you can train you can train sooner harder for longer without exhaustion meaning you're going to have a stimulus to signaling you have a greater stimulus to hypertrophy you're going to have a greater response to recoverability because you replenish oxygen faster with nutrients around and you're not going to die when we start into introducing greater uh blood pressure increase or like increasing repel cell count compounds like the stuff that people don't comprehend when they look at this it's like oh i just take tests and my test levels go up i've got to protect my liver and kidney that's cool but we start adding in certain compounds we start adding in higher dosages of tests beyond the TRT range, we start adding in Masteron, Sprema, Bollens, Tremblones, we're going to start getting an increase in production of red blood cell count That means at a certain point if the valve is only so big that it only going to fit so much through i going to keep adding pressure to that system and so to me it always made sense at a bare minimum you not having to do fucking you know 30 minutes an hour a day of cardio every single day if you want to do a light state like that cool that's on you but at a bare minimum to get prepared for a what will be required in prep but also just to be fucking healthy as a bodybuilder 20 minutes three times a week if you can't find 20 to three times a week for your health as an athlete don't fucking tell me you want to compete yeah but see there's this it's just it's just a weird thing because bodybuilders it's bodybuilding is a sport of extremes and it is a and you know it's a it's one of the out of all strength sports it's like uh very much like american politics you're either team a or team b so you get people and and i would even say it's almost like a third world country where you have like five percent of guys who actually know what the fuck they're talking about and the rest of them just repeat the same stupid bullshit because it confirms their bias and they all sit in this echo chamber and go i got these people lean without doing any cardio i and i i'm not disagreeing that you can get people lean without cardio i'm all for that if they're healthy to do that but if they're not why don't we do some cardio get them healthy and then pull the cardio out and just work if you want to starve yourself to get lean and you want to put in dnp and fucking thyroid and you put some Sinomel and some Clin or whatever, go for it. But all these things are compounding to add stress to your system. And people aren't looking at, you know, you're only looking at acute variables of how they feel. Oh, I took that. That Clin was way stronger than I thought. I took way too much. Okay, you're buying underground shit. That's what happens. But they think that they just, well, I'll just skip a dose and I'm fine. But you don't see what's happening in your vessels. like you don't actually see that you're creating inflammation and building up some plaque you're not and you're you're strong enough where you don't see that until it's been 20 years and all of a sudden you start getting angina you go in and you've got 98 blockage in your arteries but they're not thinking about that because they're just thinking about a stupid fucking plastic trophy and yeah literally and this is the the exciting thing i think has made content as much as i despise instagram in a lot of ways in the influencer realm content has made some of this knowledge a little bit more applicable where we're seeing guys like companies like merrick health like i've been fortunate enough to be able to put some content on their page which is awesome but we're seeing places like merrick health exists where we're looking at don't stop letting the health go as if like this idea that using health as a byproduct of bodybuilding is just fucking redundant the idea that you can't be healthier and be a successful bodybuilder is just stupid it's just that no one ever tried they were so caught up in it's like watching boxers do weight cuts they all think the same way that it has to be this way because my coach did it and his coach did it and his coach did it and so it's like an ancestry level of knowledge that's just retarded and you're basically doing these drastic dehydration little fucking protocols to get to get into to make weight we have the same approach in bodybuilding and saying this is okay it's just a byproduct to be extreme yeah okay but at a certain point you don't want calcification in your heart you don't want calcification in your vessels you don't want calcification your fucking brain you don't want plaque build up in your brain you don't want to just get to a point where you're like you know i've seen this linear progression of people where it's you know the more trend they take the more the more 90 nords they start throwing in and you start seeing like their belief in very heavy like tinfoil hat like conspiracy theories and it's like really in australia the ones who are like like these really outspoken former bodybuilders it's like as they've gotten older did nothing to protect their health you can just tell brain atrophy is a curve or like brain something's damaged up there for sure and it's like this this notion that it's it's oh let's let's try and reactively heal it after the fact and then think it i'll get some tests done when i finish competing i'll get this done once every two years yeah and so much damage has been done already and you go oh it's too late i'm something like prep who cares i'm gonna do it anyway i need like it doesn't matter we get so caught up in this i'm a tough fuck mentality roughneck hardcore did not realize and like broderick said you know it's not hardcore dropping dead to win a trophy yeah you know it is hardcore doing the stuff you don't want to do like everyone's all in on bodybuilding until it's doing the stuff they don't want to do which is taking care of blood work looking at blood markers looking at the heart values looking at their blood pressure doing their insulin their faster blood glucose testing you're not doing those things but you're all in on bodybuilding and you're going to do whatever it takes to win well winning might be a 5-10 year journey but you're a daughter for that the thing is that is it's that's what i've noticed living here it is very much uh an australian mentality to try to be the toughest person do the most amount of shit and try to get away with it and i remember the i was at a french gym here in brisbane uh powerlifting gym and one of the guys came he drives up in his suv gets out by the time he walked from the car into the gym which wasn a far walk his head was already purple yeah and he had a nosebleed And I like bro let what are you on He was on a thousand milligrams of Trinacetate I like Oh fuck Why And I was like and I have a theory I actually have a theory about this is that because everybody's getting underground shit that they were so used to taking underdosed Trin or underdosed gear that they'd kept pumping the doses up until it worked. But now underground stuff's actually getting pretty good. So it's like now they actually have real trend, but now they're actually taking a gram where they may have been taking 300 milligrams before. And they didn't think to lower the dosage when their blood pressure got to 180 over 100. And they started getting nosebleeds when they fart. Like the drug stuff really baffles me because I've never been a heavy drug guy. Like whenever I've done, I've pushed the limits a couple of times when I was in my early 20s just to see what it would do. Um, and what I found after a couple of weeks of doing stupid shit, I found, man, the, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I'm, I'm not actually getting anything better other than side effects out of this. Cause I was doing things like 850 milligrams of Tren acetate for a week or a couple of weeks. And it was making me emotional and it is making me psychopathic. Um, and I was like, okay, well that's too much. So go down, let's say 200. And now I'm more of like a look. But Trent is so powerful. You could take 30 milligrams three times a week and you would be real fucking happy with that without night sweats and insomnia and feeling like you're going to beat your wife and that type of shit. You know, even like Anivore, I used to be in Anivore like, oh, guys got to have 60, 80 milligrams Anivore. I think if people just took 20 and kept their kidneys healthy, they'd be really surprised what even 20 milligrams every day can do. even test like fucking i just got i just uh got some trt i probably shouldn't say i smuggled some in from the u.s because i couldn't get i can't get anybody to prescribe me trt even though i've been hypogonadal since i was 36 they look at me and they go you don't look like you need tests i'm like look at my labs i'm hypogonadal no yeah don't worry about it but i 150 milligrams of test a week i put on seven kilos the guys they've got them as more as better mentality and i'm like no no, there is a law diminishing returns where the benefits are not outweighing the side effects. But this ties in so perfectly with the idea of preparation, because one of the things I find is when I get to like, let's say I've done a massing phase with a client and we've got to a point where things have been escalated slightly and they're up to like a peak dosage, if you will, or a peak load. And it's like, I'm not going to run that stagnant till we start prep because prep is going to require you to go up again. I'm not going to do that. At a certain point, that's going to come back down in that downward phase this is a big thing that i try to make sure is that we're getting healthy in that block of time so that you can't handle what prep is about to bring in as you say here like we're making sure the blood markers are good blood pressure is good heart values are good you know cholesterol levels are good we're looking at a total just just get a blood cell count just have you looking at your lymphocytes your nanoscience looking at these things are like are these factors in a good position to handle the increased loads about to come if they're not we're not starting prep until they are if that means we push back six months cool but by doing that it's it's looking at and it's a the one thing i'll give australia because like part of psych and doing our neurological degrees courses they have to teach you about uh psychothymacology and drug addiction and things like that because if you head down that path of psychiatry or psychology you prescribe obviously you've got to understand risk factors um is australia's bigger policy of harm reduction i take a similar approach with supplementation recommendation because a lot of the time we know people are going to do it regardless we know that they're going to do it right i could be irresponsible and let them go to some coach who's just going to throw two grand to train them and say yeah jack cool you're going to die but by learning these things understanding these things having someone in a healthier position at a more sensitive position means that they're they're standing to benefit from a more responsive position they're going to respond better on less and get away with like get away with less getting more out of that more juice like squeezing more out of what they're already using rather than adding more in right and that's i think something that people fail to comprehend in this game especially in australia is you yes you can out drug bad work but that trade-off catches up in five to ten years if you're not taking care of that health you're not looking at those factors we're talking about that's where bodybuilding really starts to someone up i've seen people in like i've worked with that that many clients that work with primal zone that work with Merrick that are just on TRT. I've worked with clients that they're only running 125 days. I will suggest an increase of 25 milligrams of actual total angio-inducing testosterone that will get them from 125 to 150, but that'll gain five kilos. And they'll message me and be like, oh, are we up in this? I'm like, what the fuck for? You want every possible positive,

official response out of doing such little amounts why would you want to risk your health like it doesn't make sense but we end up in this rabbit hole in australia where it's like but i've got to do more because this guy said the output this guy's doing three grams like cool he's 130 kilo pro bodybuilder yeah a very smart coach in his childhood his adaptation response is the threshold so high he has to run that we want to avoid that yeah there's i mean there's always a ceiling there's a ceiling with everything there's a ceiling where more is not necessarily going to get you anywhere it may give you a little bit like you add a little bit more maybe it gives you another three or four percent benefit but it gives you 35 more side effects like that is not a good if you looked at that like investing yeah you'd be like i'm gonna buy penny stocks because it may actually explode but like you're probably just gonna lose all your fucking money like you would never no no one would ever do that but that they do that with drugs and i think a lot of the case too they start chasing the dragon yeah they they add some more and they go i don't think it's working anymore it doesn't feel the same so they add more and they get that next boost and they're like okay then it stops working and it's like a lot of the guys i don't train a lot of people on gear um i've got a handful of guys on trt and one of my guys he's he's on like 160 165 milligrams a test like hey coach i think i need more gear i was like why do you need more like you're just on trt goes i don't feel it anymore i'm like okay you were correcting a deficiency so now you no longer feel like a little 12 year old boy a little eunuch boy you're not it's not supposed to make you continue feeling something it's supposed to make you not feel like garbage anymore which is what it did yeah it's like if you want to add more let's just admit you want to do a cycle and if that if you're going to admit that i'm okay with that yeah so then let's plan out a cycle that's safe for you but you want to do trt recycle no i just want to do trt i'm like okay you don't need any more your fucking labs are looking fantastic why would we add more to this that's retarded see i think there's a two-pronged problem here that i see with guys that start with me they're on trt from from a clinic and you know usually they're working with like dave lee the web of primal zone they're working they already have their prescriber uh which is fantastic it means they get quality control lab supported pharmacology which is fantastic a lot of the time i find is when they start they don't have the foundational principles of the building blocks in place which i praise to primal when i first started like i'm not going to take anyone that's just already like hoping to throw gear at the wall and see what sticks the the premise is i think a lot of them don't have the foundations of training in place lifestyle in place nutrition in place sleep hygiene uh like liver understanding antioxidation you know nutrient diversity like having fruit having vegetables sunlight exposure these but these fundamental needs like if you look at maslow's hierarchy they're a fundamental need basically for some for more than just existence but to actually thrive as a human they're fundamental needs for you to actually do more than just survive i fucking hate be like oh let's just survive the year no try to thrive aim to thrive by doing these things a lot of the time they start these trt doses and And they feel such a strong benefit because their life is so in shambles that it's like this is the one positive. It also tells me how low the general health is that you're at such a deficient level that return to baseline, you suddenly think like you need more. Like you don't understand that that's how you're supposed to feel every day. You've realized that you've gone from negative five to plus five. You feel net neutral, but it was so bad that you're now looking at this as like, oh, I need to get another plus five. it's like no we've brought you back to normal you're inside like this is what you should have every day for the last 25 years but you haven't because you're fat you're overweight you're lazy you haven't started you know taking care of your health so there's these pronged approaches that i find that those are some of the reasons i see these guys go oh i need to add more it's like they're trying to out drug their lack of training intensity or proficiency they're trying to out drug their nutritional literacy and i'm not saying that's your guy here but more so that feeling is probably felt was like oh i feel like an actual male like i feel like a fucking man right now i want to keep that going well let's put like those things in place and you will feel that yeah i was i think i was i can't remember i was doing a talk i think i can't remember where it was but i was talking about oh it might have been at silverback where i said look i personally think that it should be required for you to hit a certain number of training sessions that you should be working on your diet and have a food log before you even before you can continue on with testosterone So it's like, because these guys think that they're going to take tests and that's the one thing that's going to fix their entire fucking life. And I'm like, bro, the test is basically just filling a gap in because you're not taking care of this other shit. If you took care of this other shit your testosterone may may not be but may actually get to a decent amount So what we need to do is like if you going to take the testosterone within the next three months you have to be working on a lifestyle overhaul You have to be prioritizing sleep, sunlight, food, hydration, training, relationships, trauma. And if you're not willing to work on that stuff, cut off their fucking testosterone because all it's going to do is amplify toxic shit that's already in their body. that the so-called roid rage that people talk about that's all the all the gear is doing is just amplifying something that's already there because somebody's got a fucking mommy daddy issue that they can't get over and they refuse to go see go to a counselor i have an analogy i use this i think you'll fucking appreciate is i have referred to on content for maric on my own page literally wrote blogs on it is at trt like we're talking inside just above physiological doses but getting someone to a normal level in their blood panels like when we're looking at free total tests it just moves them into that normal higher end of the upper echelon of normal range in australia we call it is trt is literally just a super soldier serum and just like in captain america red skull tried to fake it and try to use it and it made him red skull he was already a bad person it just super superfied what he already was internally and like you watch like the very core of the movie the reason why uh uh steve rogers is selected is the scientist says it's not about his bravery i'm sorry it's not about you know his his roughneckness hardcoreness it's not about how tough he how you know bravado he isn't being a jack he is inherently a good person and this will make him a continuously even better good person yeah he learns the five he's super strong and super enhanced that sort of stuff but as the drug did it enhanced his characteristics as a dip of red skull enhances characteristics at the base of it outside of adding 19 nores outside of adding you know looking at mastrons and looking at decades and cream of bones whatever else just test that is essentially what it is doing so if you put your core are a shit person and refuses to work on that that's not going to fix your life it's going to make you a more shit person yeah you could you could if you want like summarize that it's fucking good i like that i'm I'm going to steal that. I give you credit, though. You could say basically that test is a personality and character amplifier. Yes. If you have poor character, it's going to make you a shit cunt. Yep. It is. The funny part is our audience is such a novel mix of 50-50 America-Australia. They're going to hate hearing that word. They may not have copped shit over there because I've said it a few times. I didn't realize how powerful the C word is in America versus here. It can be descriptive. It can be an insult it can be yeah it's a fantastic word and the thing is like that's the that's the thing i i like living over here is that no one gets offended that you say like they just laugh or they just they just don't they just ignore it like no one gets outraged because you said a word that they don't that evokes some type of feeling in them and that speaks more about them than than the word but yeah and if you don't like that come at me yeah the other thing that i had to like brooklyn was like prepared for for me saying in our presentations over in america was like like i i didn't realize taking the piss wasn't an american phrase and i said it but my summits uh where ali presented as well coach catalyst summit and i was up there and i was like trying to give this example of of uh people seeking piss and taking the piss and drinking they thought i meant someone taking a literally pissing yeah taking an actual piss i'm like i read the room and i'm like that didn't land at all i'm like you guys you guys know what and i just look at this room stunned i'm like oh so you have to teach you some australian slang real quick this is what that means they're just like oh now it's funny i was like that did not land at all i've gotten so conditioning to saying the c word that just kind of falls out and i don't think about it because over here it's not a big deal i was in austin at one of our seminars and i think i dropped like four c-bombs in a row and everybody it was just silence and they were staring with their mouths open i was like yeah i really blew their mind with that one and i'm like wait a minute those aren't good looks on what they're like that word i'm like which one that the c word with the four letters i went oh you guys are still uptight about that get over yourselves we haven't moved have passed this yet but it is it is a very good point when looking at health factors like and this is where even pre-preparation again like ali ali's protocol is gpp for trt it's such i think again bodybuilders are at such extreme of this that it should also be an extreme of that preparation yeah if you not prepared to take the drug then don compete i i often a lot times if someone hasn already come to me enhanced i will put them through natural federations Firstly not just to get them lean and that sort of thing but to see if they prepared to like the lifestyle of bodybuilding before they take drugs Because if you don't like bodybuilding inherently in and of itself, and you don't like what it requires, then drugs aren't going to change that. You're trying to cheat your way through that process. You think more drugs will make it an easier system, but the reality is the thing that have found is the more drugs you take the drugs that you use the things that compounds will introduce the harder you have to train because your body has such adaptability to it to get the signals that we want to get the recovery but also the sensation like to your ability to train hard on subs you will now realize you can train so much harder that you're probably training like a beforehand so if you think it's gonna be easier because you're taking gear it's going to expose you so to me i use almost like a natural stepping stone like if you get through one or two natural seasons like like hey that is not it for me i'm like cool we're not even going to touch non-androgenic injectables non-androgenic compounds like everyone's first thought of peds is like straight to test and huge doses of master on but a lot of the guys a lot of girls i'll look at go injectable or come team let's see if you can even earn like if you can even use that let's see if you're comfortable with injections you know we're gonna look at some oral compounds clonbuterol we look at some things that might be beneficial to you that are non-androgenic they still have a good muscle potential response which you can preserve some tissue a small diet microdose of clint if you can't diet first and handle cardio first i'm not giving you clint that's just you trying to soften your way on protocol so if you can get stage lean first earn it prepare for what's going to come then i've got your back and i will guide you through fucking your 5-10 year ipb career but if you're someone who gets to the natural level first like hey this fucking sucked i did not enjoy this the lifestyle is great but i want to learn back from that i want to ease back from that fantastic let's just get you to eight weeks out let's get you to 10 weeks out lean and be happy with that but that to me is like such a it's something that we as coaches have to be willing to do which i think a lot of people especially with how many coaches are in our game now they just want to take anyone and everyone they want to just take the first person that calls them up like hey i want to compete i know nothing else about you about your life but i'm going to put you on stage because i'm a coach and i need the result have some fucking ethics and dignity and the longevity of your client in mind and say hey dickhead instead of rushing this we're going to take some time and if you don't want to do that with me i'm not the coach for you but i want to see you live past 40 and get a good result yeah that that that actually is a good lead-in for my my second part of the prepping to prep thing which is women because what is what when we started the pregnant prep thing for the guys it was all about that like get healthy and don't get too fat in the off season because it's not it is not serving you to get massively overweight and people will go well, obese people can hold 20 to 25% more lean body mass, just carrying the weight around. I'm like, that is true. But when they diet down, they lose that benefit. So unless you're willing to wear a fucking fat suit all day, we don't need to worry about that extra lean body mass because it's going to go away. But, uh, when I was still training a lot of physique athletes, I started training lots of women and this is, this is when, God, this has got to be close to two decades ago where you had like female physique. Bikini was kind of like a new thing. And you had more girls that wanted to, they'd go to a show to see their friend compete and they go, that looks like fun. I'd like to compete. And they'd come to me and they'd be like 36% body fat. And they go, Hey, I found this show in 12 weeks. That's here in town. I want to do that. And I'm like, honey, you've never trained. You have no muscle. Like you have no fitness, no muscle. Like, oh, you're just going to, you're going to look like a coat hanger when you get on stage. Like you don't even have the frame for this category. We have to build that. And, uh, and I, you're probably 18 to 24 months in even considering this. And I'm like, oh, well, you know, Jojo down the street said he could get me on stage in 12 weeks. I go, well, you don't even need him to get on stage. Cause there's no prerequisite. All you need to do is pay for it and get on stage and go embarrass yourself. So if you want to go to him, he'll fuck you up and then come back to me man, I'll fix everything, but I'll charge you twice as much. Yeah. Like, OK, I think I'd rather take 36 to 48 months to do this. So that was kind of like, look, you're not even ready to start a contest prep. Like you have to get ready for that. Right. And that's what I see with the women's side is sometimes they they are delusional about how lean they think they are, because most trainers don't unless you've been dick skin lean. You actually most coaches don't even know what true body fat percentage looks like. They'll put them on a BIA or something and they'll say, oh, you're 17%. And I look and I'm like, she's 32%, bro. Like she's not even close to being teens. Right. Or, you know, guys will say they'll post a picture of themselves. I'm 7%. I'm like, bro, you're like 19. Like, fuck it. Fuck. 7% in your dick, baby. It not even close But yeah but like getting people even even not just like physically in shape from the metrics but actually like physically in shape for like your body fat level and your level of muscle mass and having muscle in the right places. You need to have that fixed. Like I wouldn't even put somebody, I normally won't put somebody in a contest prep like a guy until he's, he's gotta be at least 12, 13% before we even really think about it. If you're 24% as a guy, like you're a long way from doing a show yeah you're a long way and uh understand those ratios those rates of loss the diminishing returns how slow it like how much it slows down system damage yeah metabolic adaptation like let's say you start at 24 and you're doing maybe a 24 like your coach isn't even smart enough to go a 24-week prep makes sense you might be 20 weeks you're looking at a 1.2 rate of loss per week every week up to show yeah none of that's tissue your body doesn't slow down and you can continue that rate of loss everything indicates that it slows down the leaner you get the closer the stage you get and the more exhausted you become and the the string starts to shorten you run out of the length of string of options or tools that you have so like and i completely agree i think it's it's so i think it's got worse now to be honest i think too many coaches have allowed the idea that body positivity and we're all equal and anyone should be able to get on stage has led to anyone get on stage in any position it used to be that like physique competition was this epsilon of elite extremity like there were magazines and the local show still had a caliber of people that was like holy i could never do that but now every time dick and harry wants to do a show which it's great for the expansion of the sport it's bad for what it does to people when they aren't ready like we're literally in the in the crux of putting a content lecture out called psychological preparation physique contest because so many people aren't mentally and physically prepared to get on stage what is what we're talking about let's like the drastic increase in potential uh percentage of female competitors we are seeing a drastic increase in higher neuroticism higher emotional dysregulation uh low degrees of conscientiousness you're not a task-oriented person you have very low sense of self-worth or body image and you're you're just somehow convinced that doing a bodybuilding show to avoid and escape the the realities of the life that you haven't confronted is going to fix those problems whilst you also have 30 body fat to pull off because your girlfriends are sat behind you being like yeah boss babe you look fantastic you should do this and then you get two weeks out realize you're still fat pull out and then bodybuilding is the reason why you're emotionally damaged the reality is even if you got on stage it would be even worse because you're going to have judges pick your worst parts next to someone's best parts be like hey you're still fat but you're to be like i put in my best i did my best and i died really hard and i think i should have won cool lady this chick's five percent body fat you're still 25 haven't trained more than six months your entire life did a jenny craig or uh what you see like the max's challenge for eight weeks and went i'm gonna get on stage and no one's there saying no because the industry needs more clients we all need like we have like it's become this especially in females like i i am so particular taking my females like i pushed one of my girls back six months i said no you were knocking on stage with your way you are mentally she won a pro card after the fact so like thank you for it but at the time was very resistant to it but she was so mentally not prepared to get on stage i said no you can go to someone else if you want to you're gonna kill yourself yeah we're not doing this but so many coaches just simply want to take it's like i do a fat loss challenge next progression is literally physique contest where you could be like there was such an echelon gap between that where it was like i'm going to work for two years to this like earn the right to compete and then try and pick a show 12 months from now and go hey i've done this for years i'm certain i want to try it out now it's like six week cut new year's resolution comp and we're just taking them we're just saying yes and like you said you know the amount of females that aren't meant like physically prepared but then with that comes the mental preparation they don't have because i've found i don't care how much this offends people how much this upsets people too many people compete in a sport that is bodybuilding that aren't athletes a lot of them are females where they're just simply being amped up by their boss babe girlfriends and no one's telling them no and telling them that they're not as good as they think they are the reality hasn't hit them yet they get on stage with someone who is an athlete them up looks absolutely terrible next to them and then they blame bodybuilding they blame their coach they blame the industry and beauty standards and all of a sudden they become a powerlifter just because they got fat and binge ate afterwards I swear to God, that is an ask Madden play-by-play for how the industry is going for a lot of the uppercutters. 100%. It is unpopular, but what you just said, earn your right to be on stage. That's like an old-school mentality thing that needs to be brought back. Back in the day, you had 20 people on stage. There was one person that should not

gotten on stage now there's like 10 people that shouldn't have gotten on stage like and their coach didn't have the nuts to tell them you're not even close let's pull out and let's do the next one i would never i would never put somebody on stage to look like that because that makes me look bad yeah and it fucks them up yeah i remember um i was training a girl she won uh ifbb i want ifbb physique she won her nationals um because a little bit different as you know in america where You have to do like amateur and then you get a you get your shot in nationals and you got to win at nationals. You get your pro card. So she and she was lifetime natural and she ended up winning and got a pro card for the IFBB. And I'm like, OK, now it's going to the next level. And then the WBFF called her and said, hey, we'll give you a WBFF pro card if you'll compete at in the WBFF. She goes, yeah. So we had just gotten off of a contest and she calls me and goes, hey, in 12 weeks, I want to do worlds. I'm like what what do you mean you want to do worlds she goes yeah I think I can I can play I can do well in worlds and I go you've never done any steroids all those girls are hopped up on a shit ton of steroids especially in physique like you're not even close you need to put like 15 pounds on are you willing I said are you willing to do steroids if you're willing to do steroids we can try to make it work she goes I'm not gonna do steroids and I was like you're not doing the show you're just gonna humiliate yourself she goes no no I'll do fine she calls me from worlds crying oh my god these girls are 15 to 20 pounds heavier than me i fucking humiliated myself and i went i fucking told you i fucking told you and then she stopped competing after that that's how that's how devastating it was and that's the that's the part that kills me is like it's one of the one of the big things like i played i played a lot of team sport like from like i was like four years old right through like australia it's australia our culture is like you get into team sport as young as possible my brothers were playing like i played my late cricket we played off-season touch we play afl we played rugby league was our sport as a family played that for 20 years before i'm a car accident my back i was living and breathing sport every time at different coaches i can still pinpoint the coaches that changed my life and the things they said like there's there's like those those remember the titans coach carter moments without these like the things they say to you stick and you're like fuck this guy changed the trajectory of what i thought about myself and the big thing for me is i use bodybuilding as i guess you call the vessel the vehicle to teach the lessons of high performance and life development and the byproduct of that optimization is a successful physique unfortunately we get these people that just they don't view bodybuilding as this lifetime long-term endeavor that like this is going to take you a long time it's a it becomes such a like you watch an in valley air or nick walker now on social media but you weren't following them 15 years ago to see what they were doing what they've given up but now because you can see their day-to-day you're like i would be that guy in two weeks time i'll be that guy like next year and it's like you're seeing the instant gratification or like the instant posting that comes with this content but you're not seeing what took 10 to 15 years to do or 20 years to do and then being like dissatisfied with the place that you got because you weren't prepared because you weren't willing to work and wait like we my like my show the last season i competed i won my my novice division made call out for my open division and i was like i'm still too fat that was just the straight up fact that i want a division and was like i am just too still fat and small in my frame it's taking two and a half years off now to know enough to take another year off to get there because like if i want to be contentious for open heavies i need to be bigger and i need to be leaner those two things coincide take a long time be bigger and be leaner at the same time the fact that like a lot of people look at this now and just go well i didn't win i didn't want to wait i rushed to it and now now bodybuilding's fucking me up they aren't willing to take the lessons of physique development through life and go where else does it benefit me and how does it serve me what can i learn from this let's go well i didn't win or like my coach is a piece of shit or bodybuilding disorders reality is you shouldn't have fucking started that's just plain and simple to me in my opinion well that's that's the common thing now is don't take personal responsibility for your bad choices find somebody else to blame i think a lot of people get coaches just so they can blame the coach because they're a shithead and they didn't do what they need to do and it's look it's not like out of every sport i've ever competed in but physically bodybuilding has been the easiest yeah it isn't it isn't fucking rocket science you add load to a muscle do the volume rest eat enough protein and you're gonna get big and strong it's not it's not fucking rocket science the hard part though that i think a lot of people getting into the sport don't understand is the mental and psychological aspect because they don't seem to understand like if going from say like 30 body fat to 22 24 for women that's not that difficult beginning from 22 to 15 is a completely different animal and going from 15 to 11 is so astronomically difficult people don think they I think well you know I spent 12 weeks and I lost like five six kilos And I like yeah but that not going to happen The leaner you get and you can try to rush it but then you going to get on stage and you going to be stringy and you not going to be full and you going to look like shit Like you going to have to slow this down So they don they don understand that Like the time that you have is you need a lot more time than you think you need yep right and it's going to get mentally difficult because honestly like going to the gym and training hard enough is not that difficult right dealing with doms not that difficult being 100 on point with your fucking nutrition when it's time when you need precision and accuracy and every gram counts that's real fucking hard telling yourself no when you're really fucking hungry that's really fucking hard going to bed hungry waking up hungry and just being hungry all the fucking time like during this cut there was a point i was doing some pretty extreme shit i was sending food shit to to zoe and she was like you're really feeling it now i'm like yeah and i'm just sending her recipes recipes i'm looking through recipe books i'm not i'm not masturbating the porn hub anymore i'm masturbating betty crocker like i'm like i can't wait to eat this cake oh it's gonna be so good oh god and like people that are said you're gonna feel like that for months yeah and then it's it's fucking true though it's it's something that i've i've propositioned proposed a lot now is the getting stage lean getting stage genuinely stage competitive condition is a skill dieting in of itself to be genuinely adherent and consistent is a skill and a lot of people that training proficiency is a skill knowing how to train close enough to failure knowing how to take your sets to full proximity and knowing how to stick to your food and be consistent in training nutrition those are skills and usually a lot more of it is mental than it is physiological like a lot of time we have these like it's one of the things that when i take someone long term is i gradually i expose them to different levels of proximities of extreme so they understand the differences right like you said to me uh going from like for a guy getting to 10 that's that's pretty lean for the average person we're looking like you're healthy 10 to go to five percent that's fucking hard to get that last two percent off your body thanks forever final eight weeks of your prep to get that two percent off but people will think like i got the 10 that's like i did that that's fine and i'm like yeah that's well and good but that final five percent that really needs to come off your category that's the rest of the prep that's the actual game yeah now you're actually playing ball what you're doing that was the first half and it took you the first half just to get you know 10 off it's going to take you the rest of the game to get that two percent off and that's out variables are up and that's where i'm like i i if i get someone long enough like we've been marketing heavily like to start with me i want 18 months minimum before you want to compete if you're like sure absolutely certain you want to compete not just expose yourself to it i want at least 18 months because realistically i'm going to take you through a surplus phase where you're comfortable being soft and know you can handle large amounts of food without getting too fat and then actually have a decent metabolic rate and a decent turnover of calorie before you start prep and then i know that you can handle being hungry because i'm going to take you to somewhat of a deficit maybe only 20 or 30 but if you're going to struggle at 30 deficit i've got guys that'll do the first six to eight weeks at a 40 deficit to get ahead of it and we're just a tidy up phase where you're in a 40 reduction in food and they struggle so if you can't even handle a 20 or 30 deficit we're not starting to prep you'll break in the first two months why the we do that when you know it's better to have you prepared exposed over time right it's no different to any school sort of skill development you scaffold the skill acquisition can you handle 20 cool let's try 30 cool next time let's get like before we start a comp prep let's see if you can get photo shoot lean cool now you photo shoot lean how hard was that that hurt well guess what happens from a photo shoot you still got eight weeks to go photoshoot lean is like eight weeks out i see all these boss babes do like a photo shoot and they look 20 weeks out from stage being like i look great it's like you're so stage ready that's not even close to what's going to take you on stage but that exposure i can then say confidently okay you have the fundamental skills you are just as much now mentally prepared as you are physically prepared and we can probably get you on stage with minimal margin of error give me one second we gotta pee real quick okay sweet right right about to clear the blood is uh we're gonna rave a lot of shit but it's it's funny too like there's so many things that people don't actually talk about that you're gonna experience when you're that lean your joints are gonna hurt yes fitting hurts like you know if you don't have a padded seat like i i go buy one of those old person donuts inflatable donuts because when you when you like that lean your tailbone is going to be fucking mangled on every hard surface you sit on like standing up walking around you going to be tired all the time Like people really need to be more, if you want to, if you want to compete and win, you just have to understand that you're going to go through some, like some really uncomfortable things. Um, and you were talking earlier about like, you know, bodybuilding and health, like there's nothing healthy about any competition, especially at the highest levels. But that's why it's so important to take care of your health before you start that. Because like my concept is we want to be healthy until it's time to get unhealthy. Yes. And unfortunately, if you want to win, you're going to go through a period where you're unhealthy. So you want to try to be healthy everywhere else. Even like with my power lifters, you know, we'll try to raise and keep their HRV pretty high. We'll try to keep their weight, like try not to let them get fat. We'll try to minimize issues with compression and joints. Like there's a lot of stuff we're doing. Most of my powerlifters, I won't do any of their competition lifts until it's time to start getting ready for me. We're working on a lot of other stuff that's similar, but different. So they're not constantly doing the same repetitive shit with heavy loads. What do you mean? Yeah. You just bench squat deadlift all year. 10 sets of three just four by six for the whole year fuck it just go but yeah there's it ties in really fantastically to another point that you guys do really well um but i would love to see a mapped out day of all like expand on it is your concept of beast mode because that is something in of itself the bodybuilders i would even argue powerlifters they get so caught up in the i've got to be the most extreme do all the cardio all training all the posing all the dieting all the stress induces all the stress metrics uh plus my training plus you know increasing drug load profusely um basically do no sleep or downtime and then wonder why stress is the body is just not responding the body's so inflamed it's the body is sparring out of control the recoverability is completely trash and it's all from this grunt cast hardcore mentality that i need to do more than the next guy the reality is the guys are they going to win are the ones doing the least or at least what is required to get by nothing more yeah i give i gotta give credit where credit is due to my friend zach drawbridge he's the one actually coined coined the word and i ran with it so years years ago probably about a decade ago we were sending each other videos of people training and they were hashtag beast mode and they're training like they're turning like pussies and like man that's beast mode like these kids don't know how to train and he goes more like hashtag least mode and i was like that's pretty good. So it evolved basically to our system of like stress management, like looking at your stress, where's your HRV, where's your heart rate, where's your blood pressure, where's your sleep scores, where's your appetite, where's your mood, all that stuff. And in like cases, if we, I'm a big fan of continuums, like everything I teach is on a continuum. There's no black or white, right? It's just like 50 shades of gray. So on one side, we do have the beast mode on one side, we have the least mode. So depending on where your physiological status is, we're going to choose where on that continuum you are. So if you have high blood pressure, high heart rate, low HRV, bad sleep scores, you have all these physiological things that are happening. It doesn't make sense to be on the beast mode side of the continuum. Like physiologically, you're already beasting your internal systems. So we don't need to add an external system that's going to make things worse. So we slide them down to least mode, which basically means you're still training hard. Like least mode isn't training like a pussy, but it's reevaluating all the variables. Like maybe you go in and you just do the lowest effective volume and lowest effective intensity. Maybe if you want to do more volume, just do a bunch of ramping warmup sets and practice the motion. Maybe hit two like good gnarly sets and really control that. Right. So it kind of lines up nice nowadays with all the research coming out. Like what's, how much do you need? like say six sets a week or three sets done twice is enough to stimulate something. It's like, all right. So in those least most stages, the goal isn't really to like try. It's not really to aim for hypertrophy. It's just to either manage your hypertrophy, keep it the same or maybe make small jumps. But it's to let everything kind of calm down. And that's where we'd go. Well, if you have stage two hypertension, maybe it's a better idea to do a little bit less resistance training, not no resistance training, because that's still massively important, but maybe we do a little bit more cardiovascular conditioning, a little bit more steps, a little bit more zone one, zone two cardio, and bring everything back to a normal level and then start sliding back up towards that beast mode. So it's, it's a good way to think about, if you think about periodization of your training, which I'm, I'm still in a lot of people, poo poo periodization, but to me, we should be periodizing everything because all that means is making a plan, like making a long plan All bodybuilders periodize whether they like it or not You have an off you have a pre and then you have your competition season and your post You're already periodizing stuff that you're just not thinking about it on a level where you would deal with a soccer player or a footy player. But you can think about that in relation to having your beast mode months. Instead of football, because every American I've spoken to so far have all called American football, football. here and you say footy is the best thing ever yeah 100 i know when i'm here i call it gridiron so they understand yeah so but you know in in sports you would always have these periodization models or we could go a long debate on whether we consider bodybuilding a sport or not you know i i think when i think sport i think team sports are things that require lots of different athletic abilities yeah so but i mean i'm ambiguous with that if you like to call it judging in competitive post yeah yeah but um like you can look at it from a position of okay i have certain months where i'm doing beast mode stuff but once i see my metrics start to go now we need to insert a small lease mode phase or two to get everything back down yeah because if you keep pushing it we it's kind of a cliche thing that everybody says you don't really make your gains when you're training and make them when you're resting. Okay, that's true, right? You stimulate and then you have to adapt. So if you're constantly stimulating and you're not able to adapt, you're maladapting. So it doesn't make sense to keep pushing your body when your body's that stressed out because you're going to hit a wall at some point. You might as well take one step back to take two steps forward. Yeah, I really like that approach. Just looking at that as a stress management system, looking at people's preps, just like you described there right if you aren't allowing that recoverability to occur which you know training is a stressor drug use is a stressor dieting is a stressor it's a fucking chronic stressor for most people shutting down those are stressors people look at preps and go i'm just gonna do all the stuff to make me hardcore as fuck and i'm gonna be the toughest guy on stage and i know that i worked harder than him but then one of the things that i try to push is like cool you trained harder than him but did you rest harder than him did you recover harder than him yeah that's where your responses are going to occur right like if you're not if you're not able to do that well they don't care how hard you train because muscle breakdown and wastage in a training session if you're in such a depletion state of food and energy we're not going to come back from that going to start chewing up muscle protein tissue and we're going to start ending up having to catabolize tissue so you look on stage we spent two years in an off season building 10 pounds of mass we just lost six of it what the point of that because you didn't want to slow down i the one thing like as much as bodybuilding isn't a sport i try to help people develop and understand is the most professional athletes know when to push and not to pull they know hard and they know when to pull back and if your ball is deep in the prep and i'm saying i just need you to go to three rar or this week i need you to go to like 50 load for a d load and you're like yeah ben said this but him what he doesn't know i'm going to add 50 extra sets of lateral raises and all of a sudden you're tearing shoulders and you're like your infra is just completely torn off and you can't do any internal rotation your bench press now sucks that's going to impact the rest of our season whether or not you can retain tissue because you still need to maintain stimulus towards the back end as much as possible tissue that we've built i try to run off the idea that the tissue that the stimulus required to build it is at least going to be the stimulus we should aim to keep to maintain it so if we're looking at you know you've got a lot of muscle tissue and you just go hard to the point where your body breaks in the back end of prep you can't do and you're now just completely stressing the body out because you just think hardcore beast mode means non-stop training non-stop cardio posing and drugs but then at a certain point that least mode has to come in to allow the adaptation to occur and allow that recoverability and then from the bodybuilding standpoint to manage the accumulative fatigue you need to be able to back off and go well you know i'm training five days of the week at least one of these days i need to have sex with my girlfriend go to the beach go to the spa get some remedial work like as much as everyone's like uh remedial uh what do you call like manual therapy doesn't do anything if I perceive it as I'm feeling relaxed and somewhat hallucinate my body, that touch point is going to allow me to reduce fatigue. So I don't give a fuck. I'm going to use that placebo and that bias to go, yep, that helps me out in my prep. I feel a little bit better after every session. Cool. So we're going to do that. But you have to have those moments in your preps. Otherwise it's just continual beast mode. And everyone knows if anyone, I don't know, fuck all that cars. I don't know if you red line a car for six straight months, guess what it's going to do? Blow up. Yeah. A hundred percent. If you, if you have a manual car, which I know a lot of people don't even know how to drive a stick shift anymore. But if you put it in first gear and you punch the gas pedal all the way down and then you don't shift the second, the engine is going to blow. Something's going to snap. So we can't always be redlining. We have to shift gears and we have to have times where it's it's time to dig and torque and it's time to switch the horsepower. You got to go back and forth. I don't know if that makes any sense to people. I'm a car guy. So like again, I think if everybody viewed things on a continuum, they they they done

understand it a little bit more because in a lot of times these these two extremes of the continuum you'll see very similar pathologies for different reasons right so for for example leptin is a good one because a lot of well hopefully a lot of coaches are understand this concept that leptin being a global appetite suppressant so back in the day it was in the 90s when they figured out what leptin did and they thought oh we had this is how we're going to get solve the obesity epidemic We're just going to inject fat people with leptin and they won't want to eat. So they did that and nothing happened. And then it figured out fat people have super physiological levels of leptin. So the receptors are desensitized. So leptin is never going to fix things. So if you, if you think about people who are grossly obese, like if you go to Vegas and you go to buffet, you'll see these guys, they can't, they're, they need three seats to sit down and they've got 25 plates stacked at the, at the buffet. They don't have a good appetite signaling. So no matter how much they eat, it never touches the side. So they're constantly hungry. Now, if we look at the opposite end of that, when you're dieting, you're going through the same shit. Nothing ever touches the side. It's still that same system, but for a different reason. Now that you're low body fat, you don't have enough leptin, but you have good leptin sensitivity. On the fat person's side, you've got plenty of leptin, but no leptin sensitivity. So you're hungry and a hostage at both extremes through the same system for two different reasons. the coaches that i mentor on this very topic that i work with and try to get like more psychological understanding of physiological responses i have them read the minnesota starvation experiment so they understand that fundamental concept like being dick skin lean your body is basically fighting every urge you to keep getting leaner like it is like you will eat until your fucking gastric system explodes if you let it that's why people have so many internal like they get so so many internal disorders or problems gastric issues they end happening like i'm going to see a coach about my gi because it's so fucked post-comp it is a fucking bottomless pit and the funny part is i'm not sure if you've seen this but i have found for a lot of clients even myself the minute you start it is it cannot be stopped it is like you have to be very introspectively aware to know like i'm not eating the satini here i'm eating for enjoyment but if i don't stop this it will keep going the system like it's almost like the signaling just amplifies gets worse and worse and worse and then all of a sudden you're throwing up yeah but if you like if you have to be prepared for like this is something i try to teach my coaches to give their clients is psychologically preparing them for what happens post-comp you're not going to satisfy that urge it'll take months to re-regulate that that systemization um exactly as you're describing here which i just cut off because i thought it was a great point is that um for that exact reason i have people try and read the minnesota starvation experiment and then also try to get them to read the Gulag Archipelago. Try to have them understand starvation and starvation as a torture. That's the thing. Basically, it's controlled starvation to get to the leanest levels. That's exactly what it is. And again, anything at that level is not necessarily healthy, but we're not looking at health. We're looking at winning a competition. I'm that type of person where if I get a little bit of carbohydrate, I can't stop. If I get a little bit of taste of sugar, I can't stop. the strategy I use with myself is I, I don't want to call it a cyclical keto, even though it becomes keto just because of the deficit. And I'm, I am showing ketones, but it's a, I use a protein leverage diet like five or six days of the week where it's three times body weight and protein and as little energy as I can get in from carbs and fats. And then I refeed over the weekend, but yeah, but in order to make that work, I have to have a massive deficit. Like I have to run on a 1500 calorie deficit. So every day in those five days, because I have to bank calories because the minute I have a bagel or a slice of pizza, I eat two pizzas or I eat 12 bagels and I can't stop. So my refeeds over the weekend are like maybe 24 to 36 hours only because I can knock out 1,500 grams of carbs in less than 12 hours because I can't stop myself. Yep. And this is such an important factor. Again, this is why I think the lecture we're trying to bring out, not to make this podcast about that, but it's just so – it's something that I wish more coaches understood, which I'm glad you brought up is the psychological stuff. So we cannot separate the psychosomatic relationship. People try to, they try to talk about like, just, just don't eat as much or just, you know, train harder. Just do this thing. Just do less heroin. Yeah. If it worked like that, fantastic. We wouldn't have all these, we wouldn't have any of these concerns. We wouldn't have jobs basically to be like train harder, eat less. Cool. I don't need a coach. The fact is the relationship between the brain and the body are so intertwined. It is systematic. It is a duality that has to exist in order for the brain to exist, the body exists, the body exists, the brain exists. You can have that separation And so when we have these things where it like a post binge and his coaches coaches it like oh just don eat or like i worked with that many girls where there show day plus one to two and the coaches drop them there is no post protocol post yeah no being there in the corner no exit strategy but the scarier part is there's no preparation for that back off like yeah you're trying to like one of the things that i start to really push is as you get closer to show day well most of the work's done we just need to guide you in now the refeed loading protocol see how you look de-stress declutter let the body relax it'll usually pick itself pretty well with those protocols i need to make sure you're mentally prepared for what happens afterwards a lot of the time it goes show day plus one see you later and then it's like well no one's told me about what the left in the grow enough no one's told me about appetite regulation i was talking about hormone regulation no one's told me about my aniridia no one's told me about any of these factors that go on in my body and now i'm left to binge and then all of a have this bodybuilding fault that's not bodybuilding you're a coach yeah and you weren't prepared for what is going to happen to your body you the second you start to get these food signals the second you start to especially when the goal is goal of show day and then you don't have a goal post comp you don't have process or performance goals outside of that it's just objectively the outcome is show day see you later there is nothing psychologically stopping you from the binge and there's everything driving you to the bench and then you get these completely lifestyles the physique's blown out body fat's gone again so four weeks time i get that client from another coach or someone else i have to diet them back down after four weeks because they've just been non-stop and any metabolic benefit they did have from insolene is gone because they just ate for you know four straight weeks and now they're back to being fatter than they were pre-comp and it's like well now i'm gonna diet you again after just doing six months of dieting i've got to re-diet you because you just it and there's no mental preparation for that or physiological preparation for that that people aren't comprehending as coaches your job isn't just show day plus stop it is getting that person out of that show it's no different than coaches that do off season reverse out of season for for any team sport you don't just go grand final see you later all right what are we doing in the off season to finish off the year and then how do we start preparing for what the year is to come 100 you see that even outside of the bodybuilding, just normal gen pop clients getting lean. Like they set a start date and they set an end date and they get really lean and the leanest they've ever been. And then there's no lead out. There's no exit strategy. It's like, okay, we need to figure out what we're going to do after this. And they need to be told during this process, like this is people are going to hear this and think I'm a monster. But I had a client that she was 102 kilos and a five foot four. so she was she's she was girthy right and and i was like we started training me four days a week at the iopc and we i started dieting her down and i just realized like just telling her to eat less food and giving a strategy that wasn't going to work so i put her on 900 calories basically put her on a protein leverage 900 calorie diet for 13 months straight and she was training like an animal she dropped down to like 62 62 kilos something like that and i wasn't going to keep her on it that long and some people listen to me going oh you can't put women on less than 1200 of course you can if her fucking if her lean body mass is like 36 kilos of course you can i'm not going to feed somebody for the other the rest of the 102 kilograms of fat um but she was doing totally fine totally fine and as she's getting closer to 60 i'm like all right we i have to start talking to her months in advance that we can't eat like this forever. We're going to start adding fruit, carbs, other stuff. We got to slowly bring you out of this. So I started that like 12 weeks in advance because I'm like, I want to bring you back up to say 15, 1600, see where we're at and try to see how much we can get away with the other direction before we have to pull it back down. But you have to start that psychological talk early, predict what's going to happen because you know what's going to happen, but they don't really understand. Say, okay, you're probably going to gain three kilos, three and a half. We're going to set that as our upper end. And if you hit that, we'll bring the calories a little bit back down and we'll start maintaining this 62 to 66 kilos or so. And it worked fantastically well. We got her up to like 1,600 to 1,800 calories and she maintained her weight. But a lot of coaches don't think to start early to let them know what they should expect when we stop the dieting process and we try to get them to some type of like baseline lifestyle position. I had a question for you on that from your perspective, like, you know, Muscle Nerds is an education platform as much as a coaching system, a consulting system. Is it because the coaches, one of the things I personally think is like the, a lot of coaching nowadays, just a bunch of people that think X's and O's is coaching and they just go, here's your set scraps and your macros and that it And they don understand how to actually well they don have the soft skills and knowledge on what the psychological relationship is to coaching which I think is wrong But do you think it because they don know to have that conversation They don't know what the body's doing. So they can't actually have that conversation with the client because they don't know what leptin and ghrelin is. They don't know what neurotransmitters are. They don't know what these chemical imbalances become. And therefore they would just be talking out of their ass to even try. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like most coaches, And I hate I don't want anybody to get offended. I mean, I really don't care. But my business is suffering. I mean, I must be honest. Most coaches have a very poor base of knowledge. They're too busy focusing on their Instagram account and their marketing and their sales. They don't spend enough time reading textbooks, reading research. And like, you know, we talked about that earlier with people like reading research, depending on what field you're in, can be really difficult to understand the research or really easy. nutritional research and exercise science is not that difficult like yeah like if you you've got to have a hopefully have a some semblance of like statistics and understanding and but a lot of it is just reading it what i'll usually do is i'll tell it read the abstract read the conclusion then go read the limitations and that's the one thing people never read like yeah if there's 12 limitations and then and then read through the whole study and make your notes but coaches aren't doing that. It's like, and then don't take one study. You got to take as many studies you can find on this and a cross-reference what they're cross-referencing in the appendix, like read all that stuff. And then, and then match that with your experiences or what you're hearing from other people. And then you'll form a really good thought process, but they don't do it. They're like, what's the best book on this? And they'll want to do some bodybuilder bro book. And I'm like, no, no, just get yourself a physiology textbook and go through the textbook or just get anatomy me in physiology for dummies, biochemistry for dummies, learn it that way, and then go to a textbook, right? But they don't spend enough time studying because they're too busy fucking working out and spending too much time on social media. That's the biggest gripe I have with my own students is they don't, they don't a lot enough time to learn why the stuff they're doing, how it works, and then how to, what to do when it doesn't work. And then I'll talk to them. And I'm like, guys, you have to understand, like, you got a car. I don't expect you to be able to work on the engine, but I expect you to know how to change the gas. Yeah. I expect you to know when to take it in to rotate your tires, when you need an oil change. You have to know that. Like, you don't need to know how the engine actually works. Yeah. Realistically, when we're dealing with people's bodies, we kind of have to know how some of that stuff works at at least a basic enough level. so number one you know what to do more importantly you know what not to do and then the third thing is you're going to understand when somebody's talking out of their ass and they're full of shit on the line yeah right so but they they look at they look at this knowledge stuff as it's too difficult or it's hard or you know or the psychological aspect of i'm just not a good reader i just don't study well well you know how you get better at that practice just practice when you start the training and then you train more and you got better training spend the time it's okay to feel like you're ignorant it's not okay to lean into that and use that as a crutch so just focus on your studies if you're going to work with people that like one of the things that really gripes me in the sort of like a post about evidence-based versus research-based coaching uh sorry science-based versus research-based coaching and one of the things we all grew up with is is a lot of people will confirm the bias they want to find their training protocols because this 10-man study with newbies that had never stimulus in their life and no protein diet history and then all of a sudden they found a 0.5 percent marginal growth in the bicep and it was like the significance it's like a power of two i was like cool this is really actually not that important at all but someone's found hey the this lengthened partial movement here it redefined how we train the bicep and you actually look at the study it's like a it's not it was significant i would be it was a population of eight fucking people that never trained before so literally anything they could have taken a piss and then it got stimulus for fucking their bicep drinking a beer gives them a fucking bite stimulus in their bicep but then it becomes their entire identity as a coach is like length and partials is it or fucking stretch hypertrophy is it or this new feed protocol is it's like you've got caught up in the trap of thinking all research is equal all research is valid because you don't know how to read research don't know how to read data and then you're trying to put that on every single client and instead of going what what evidence do what do i understand what do i know but also how does this apply to the people i work with and is this relevant to my population and is it relevant to the person i'm giving it to because in amongst that there are obviously outliers when you do enough of a population sample you'll start to get outliers there's the very real possibility the person you're working with might be the outlier of that study might not even fit that demographic you had Like the stuff they leave out of the abstract or the concept when they discussing it might be like these are 45 to 70 year old females who had never trained before and they had a single increase in leg extensions at the most lengthened position with the chair back 45 degrees rec fed increase was 0.25 millimeters on this board it's like no this woman's never trained in her life as a psychopath and basically had no muscle mass ever and you've given her some protein and exercise and all of a sudden she grew tissue that's not that doesn't apply for your people that doesn't mean you now base your entire identity as a coach on that thing yeah i get a real gripe within our industry is how evidence-based approaches has become like anything any researcher says is now fact and yeah and your entire body of coaching to that it's become like a religion it's become like a religion a badge of honor and it's like but guys come on man like 13 people in a study 13 subjects that is not enough to really create any great conclusions Then it's like, okay, we took 13 people and we classified them as trained or untrained. Untrained was less than 12 months of training. Trained, well-trained was over 12 months. I don't know anybody that's been training a year that's fucking well-trained. That is like my next drop in fucking research. We can't even definitively criteria what trained means. I've seen studies that are like, oh, they're four years trained. I'm like, I spent five years training for different things, and I'm still getting better at my training. Like I'm six years competing and I'm still getting better at my training proficiency. I'm still adapting and getting better understanding of mechanics, limiting factors, exhaustion points, fatigue, proximity to failure. If I'm still getting better at that, how the fuck is 12 months classified as trained? Any stimulus with next to no control is fucking going to have a result. They'll say advanced, advanced subjects. And I'm looking at it going, all right, I don't consider anybody advanced until they've got at least three to four years of solid training. like 48 weeks of the year under supervision or knowledge base. Like you are not, if you look at it, you look at the, they'll say advance. And then I'll look at what they're lifting, like how much load they're lifting. And I'm like, that's not advanced. That's, that's first year gains. Like, that's not like, what the fuck? And then when they'll try to apply, they'll get like gen pop clients who have never lifted before. And they want to take the research and supply that to their client. Like your client, would grow muscle on the step mill your client would grow muscle just from showing up at the gym like you don't need to get that fucking technical just use basic but like pumpkin spice latte basic bitch exercises that we've done forever like pick a horizontal push-pull movement a vertical push-pull movement a knee extension knee flexion movement pick a triple flexion triple extension movement an elbow flexion elbow extension movement and maybe a shoulder abduction movement you're pretty fucking good with that like you don't like the first three years five years you could just do that and they would fucking grow yeah you don't need to pull out your protractor you know you don't fucking a 55 degree angle of a slightly lean with lateral flexion to get the most out of my lap pull down on one arm lord like and here's the thing some of that stuff like getting really pedantic about training i see the value in that when you're really advanced yes and you're trying to eliminate a weak point in your physique right yeah so like you might have somebody with really good like anterior and lateral delt and there might be just one little one little divot right there between lateral and posterior and like okay cool let's get that the right angle to match that with the resistance profile cool yes nobody has been training just a couple years no one needs that kind of shit that's that's one of the things that really gets me especially like the coaching industry that's really taking off now is like guys that aren't even in the necessary realm to have this conversation are spending so much time having that conversation that they're wasting time on their clients like if you think your client debbie is coming to you for a 45 minute session three times a week who could probably benefit from a push pull legs or full body three times a week and then go home have sex and eat the protein is needing to have a specific lateral head chest supported supernated lat pull down that takes 45 minutes to set up yeah like the inverse inverted you starts to come in where it's like beneficial beneficial beneficial takes too long to set up the other training yes bro Debbie can barely walk and chew gum at the same time put her on a fucking leg press I just don't understand why Debbie can't front squat I'm like Debbie Debbie is a soccer mom she doesn't need a front to put her on a fucking leg extension a leg press machine versus freeway debate that somehow respark itself I don't know how that came back up but that's apparently a thing right if you if people saw my program and they'd be like man that's really basic i'm like yeah it's really fundamental basic shit because it works and the only time it ever gets any fancier is if we've got an injury we're trying to fix or work around or i need to do something complex to make it work the most frustrating

The thing to me is I literally give away like how on the Matter Institute, we have a 90-minute lecture that I wrote because it was frustrating me so much and I was going to charge for it. I was like, fuck it, just have it. But it literally goes through how we map out exercise selection, order of execution, and basically proximity of intensity, going from complexity to simplicity, and going from internal to external stability, and going from complex joints to singular joint movements, and basically letting fatigue dictate how your exercise selection varies. basically a squat pattern something's gonna drive a lot of intensity it's not gonna require a little follow like you get fucking strong in it the team sets in you end up finishing with a leg extension yes that's fucking it's like in between that you fill the gaps and what you're trying to do obviously in a volume of blah blah whatever but the point being is like it's so simple most of my program based on my workouts don't exceed six to seven exercises and if they do someone has a high ratio of volume I need to hit but usually it's like inside six exercises and then they're done they're like oh and usually you get met with oh it was really boring the session wasn't that hard i'm like you're taking every set to two rar i guarantee you it wasn't boring oh no i get it then you get a training video and the training's like a dog shit you're like okay we're gonna do a face-to-face session and really train and that's now your new proximity to failure and that's what you're gonna use yeah it's hard yeah we'll use typically will teach speed failure and technical failure so like when when one rep doesn't feel like the other ones stop there for now until we learn how to control that that instability under fatigue or we'll say look when what i think speed is a good one too it's like all right when you feel the first rep that feels slower than the others good you're probably like a three rar when you feel two that's slower right you're about a two when you feel one slower you probably have one more really janky rep your technical affair I don't want you to do that one but we're close enough right but consider this like I train I don't train I do train Jim Pop people think that we don't train Jim Pop we do train a majority of coaches like they don't even understand how hard they need to train I look at videos and I'm like bro I know I give you a 10 to 12 rep range but your 12th rep look like the first rep just next time keep doing it until you can only do a half a rep and that'll give me a better idea of like how to load you and tell you what to do but they'll just they'll do like they're just cruising through it's like they're doing fucking cardio for the biceps and they'll go like 11 12 that was hard i'm like bro you had probably eight more reps in there one of the things we do for onboarding is because i was literally getting as a online i was finding especially even like people want to compete that was such a problem i was like one of the onboarding uh exercises that sent me is like i just go through movement mechanics i want to see some baseline movements and see fundamentally how your body responds how you move sorry but then i was like pick any machine pick any machine that you can think of that you understand how it moves aim for a weight that you think you'll finish at 12 to 15 reps on and then go until you see i'm not going to say stop go until you can't do another rep of that weight don't second guess it don't try and think what i want you to see pick the weight go from there and the amount of people that overshoot the rep range like they'll say at 12 and i get a video with 20 and i'm like yeah okay cool you have no proximity of understanding the failure here we're going to start teaching you to go to failure because you don't even like people get so caught up in like oh you're gonna be too back from failure when 90 percent of people don't understand what failure looks like so you're teaching too back from not even being back far enough from failure already so what might have already been a five rei you're teaching someone fucking seven that's what makes it where we are yeah i'd say uh like i have a planet fitness membership and i know a lot of people are going to go ooh boo planet fitness but it's summertime here it's hot as fuck and not a lot of gyms have aircon so yeah yeah really nice cold aircon in there and the machines are well well maintained if you're just doing bodybuilder bullshit like i'm doing now it's perfect because you got fucking multiple machines for everything but i'll i'll train in there and i must look like a fucking psychopath because i i'm i'm on a machine and I'm just like I can't grunt but I'm close to it like I'm going like I'm this vein looks like it's going to pop my head starting to purple and I'm squeezing out that last rib and people are walking by me going what the fuck but then you look at everybody else and they're just like just doing whatever I'm like bro why even show up at the gym like you're not even like I know it's making you feel better but you're not actually doing anything you ticked a box but you missed about seven other boxes but we're going to wrap up soon because we'll fucking talk all day and i absolutely know that we've already covered fucking 17 different topics but the the other side to you that i really love and i want to expand a little bit more on this is the jacked nerd side the muscle nerd side of it is something that i've really noticed like the people that we excel well with are that they generally have a curiosity and nerdness to them that is very it it funny because it become almost cool to be a nerd now but like there people that genuinely i find like genuinely inherently bored born as a nerd and they're like they are nerdy people you are probably one of the few people where i'm like i could sit in a conversation with you and not feel like i'd have to explain what a comic is or like where that storyline went or like what this game is about or some shit like i'm like that is very few people have that fucking with but what is your nerd thing what is your like besides like movement mechanics and exercise heart rate blood pressure things like that but what is your like henry cavill's a fucking gamer and warhammer 40 000 i go to town and we'll have a 40 000 and fucking marvel and dc star wars lord of the rings i dabble where are you where is luke's nerd oh man i'm a big gamer i game when i have time i game so i've got fuck i've got every system you can think of i built i built my computer i built a badass gaming computer i've got all the handhelds um i've got even stuff i've got to still have a psp and a ps vita all of them are jailbroken with emulation like i've got a steam deck you know you name it i've probably got it but i mean i am a big gamer but i like that and i just like to learn stuff i'm just constantly have beginner's mindset just constantly finding new things like my new thing is this is where baking like i want to learn how to bake i'm not a baked goods person but but like zoe bought me a kitchenaid mixer for my birthday and so now i'm like baking and trying to come up with new formulas i look at it like i'm in a lab i'm making new formulas how can i make this taste as good as possible with really high protein and almost no fucking calories in it without it making me shit my pants. Um, like I'm the guy, like she thinks it's funny. If I get obsessed, it's again, it's the ADD thing. I'll go and buy all the best shit I can possibly afford for it. And I'll play with it for a couple of months. I'll get bored. I'll go to something else. And then like a year later, I'll come back. I do a lot of car stereo stuff. So that's a really, that's a really cool science in and of itself of learning imaging and how sound waves operate, especially when you have a lot of like glass and plastic for things to bounce off of and learning how to tune the car and i build all my own boxes and fabricate i do all that stuff yeah so uh what are you gaming at the moment what's your like what what is the games like currently i've just finished oh fuck i'll be like four paragon characters on diablo 4 and it's just i'm over the storyline now um i'm probably midway through ghost of tashima but like i need to have i don't know you but i'm a big storyline gainer like if i get into a like i don't like online gaming so much anymore because it's all become like you have to pay for passes and battleground and it's against other people like i used to love when assassin's creed or call of duty used to have these dynamic storylines where you feel like i'm like i feel like i'm killing some terrorists i feel like i'm doing something like that's me i'm in there and those are the stories like i'll still play them now i buy assassin's creed just so i can play a long-winded 120-hour game And don't have to be online. But that's why I fucking love that. I can just switch off and not think about it. So I like, I'm a big fantasy guy. So I've always been a fan of, like, I read a lot of fantasy. Like, my current thing is I read a lot of lit RPG, which is basically if you're a gamer and you like fantasy, it's the best of both worlds. So I read a lot of that. So most of the stuff I play will be that. I never did, like, all my buddies play COD and, you know, all these army games. It doesn't do anything. I like Wizards and Knights and shit. So I still play World of Warcraft. I've been playing World of Warcraft since the start. But now I play it on a private server, so it's got cool different rules and strategies there. I still play a shitload of Souls games. Like, that's my favorite. If I want to switch off, I'll play Elden Ring or Dark Souls 3, and then I mod everything. So I like playing with mods. I don't like playing with cheap mods, but I like playing with mods that add more levels to the game or add new sorceries and all that stuff, characteristics of it. So I do all that shit. Yeah. i'm probably like i'm pretty much to say like for me fantasy and storytelling is probably like the biggest engagement if it's not like a world war ii based game or like a world war ii variation like say like wolfenstein where i'm like that to me starts getting really fun but for the most part like you know what if storylines something like that if a game has that but i i got so caught up in the fallout universe like i like i have this like brooklyn lasted me for it but i can't just play a game if it has a great fantasy i will have to study the lore of it and know what's happening I get annoyed if there's a great story and there's no continuation to it. So like, Fallout, Fallout universe has such depth to it. And it's like, Wikipedia will have incomplete pages and I get pissed off. And I'm like, how do I, how do I like know more about what this virus did or the reason why the nukes fell? And when the fucking TV show didn't match the game, I was so fucking angry about it. I'm like, I don't want to be that nerd snob, but like, fuck you for fucking with this. But it's true. They should stick. They should stick to the story. If you have a great story, Why do you need to change it? Why change it And that was like that to me I get so wrapped up in on like if I reading usually it reading law to a game that i playing i want to know more about that i like like part of what got me into 40k warhammer was like i played the warhammer strategy games like the rpgs and the uh the mmr sorry the uh first person the real-time strategy rts and then i was like this story is awesome what is this game like what is the the background of this and it was warhammer was so deep i'm like there's 20 years of my life i could read on this as a thing and it's just such a way for me like i can almost i can guarantee you're not even worse than me but you get so caught up in being on task i mean on things that being involved in a fantasy that's so unreal but so deep it's just a way to switch off and it's such a i can do this i think but i'm thinking yeah and the thing is fantasy is the the lore is so cool because a lot of fantasy has kind of this underlying there's a kind of an underlying formula for it but then it's such different spinoffs depending on what culture is we're talking about right like like elden ring has underlying things that you'll see in other games but then they have their own spin on it and that's what i like because it so it's like you never get you never get bored of it um there's uh one thing i like like i like um games where there's like mathematics involved like with the strategy so like how to maximize damage how to minimize how to maximize defense and minimize the The hits you're hitting, building something, like different types of builds and shit like that. That's why I love World of Warcraft, but I don't like World of Warcraft anymore, not the main game. But if you play it on private servers, it's actually a lot better. Yeah. The only part for me that really lost me in Diablo, because the original, probably first two, had really deep biblical mythos story to it. like it was like we could play for hours and the stories were so deep and engaging this last one has became become mostly like there's a quick storyline like i think it beat it in like 20 hours and then it gets to the paragon which is like the post game more of the online multiplayer like the post game wrap-up missions you can do and like that which is basically the rest of the game is but it becomes more about your class build but my class build inside an epic storyline Assassin's Creed Odyssey to me was fucking fantastic because it was like Greek mythos mixed with alien technology mixed with going back in time mixed with building out a certain type of assassin I was like that is fucking I was the dick of the guy that made that have you played Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3? I never played Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 is good bro I've sunken so many hundreds of hours on that I might have to get it I've like spoken to people about boulder's gate i'm like i've played every other fantasy basically imaginable but i've never played boulder's gate it's it's it's wicked because it's depending on the choices that's going to affect the rest of your game yeah so and then depending on the character as well so you could play that game over and over and over and get a game and and never never actually touch the sides of what you could actually do like people are still finding shit in their secret shit that nobody knew about it's been out already a couple years yeah those are fucking those are games i love like the as a way to just completely switch off is having a game that i could repeat 10 times and never repeat the same game yeah like yeah the storyline might be similar but like like fallout 4 for example is great because it's like there's four different factions you can side with inside the game that each of which change the story and inside of that you can redesign your character characteristics of how you play the game like you can go through and be like this time i was just a tank he was just hard gun fighting fuck shit up basically barge my way through everything a power armor or i'm a guy who's coming in with charisma intelligence and intellect and i can basically talk my way out of anything like there are so many different role plays that you can play and i'm like these are this is so much more engaging to me than just playing call of duty where i'm just 11 up to buy skins and get a new fucking gun like yeah cool when you when you play games like that do you do you get a character with your characteristics or you try to do something different i probably it depends if i really enjoy the game or to go start to finish and repeat i usually will probably do something similar and then try and also like make up different like i'm going to be this time a more of a detective like full that's bigger like you could be a intellectual guy you can be a brute you can be nerd you can be like whatever you need even being like male and female changes the characteristics game so like i'll probably play three or four times through and probably have a structure build similar to me and then like what happens if i was just an absolute jack tank and dumb as dog just march your way through or like what if I was a girl that had more like persuasive power and charisma and I just basically just like Manipulate my way through the game Play with because that way it's the same story which is awesome post-apocalyptic world, but it's like 50 different ways I could end the game Yeah so I always have always picked stuff that opposite of me So I don pick tanks It always like the wizards or necromancers or mages yeah yeah because they the most frail fucking glass cannons ever but once you build them up to where they can actually cast really cool shit you're like just destroying everything yeah yeah uh final question final two questions because we'll be here all day nerding out you've got a cheat day a refeed diaper i gotta give a fuck i know that you're in america with alice probably cereal and cinnamon scrolls but you're back in texas wherever i don't care what is your go-to free meal cheat meal that you're just going to absolutely fucking binge on and you're not going to throw it back up um that you were like i would froth this meal i could have it 100 times a week and not care god that's hard that's hard if i was in texas it'd probably be actually probably be mexican food mexican food or tex-mex i noticed i did notice when we were in san diego the difference in and That's obviously even still far away, but very, very like on the border. The difference in Mexican style that we have, you know, Guzman's here, but the authentic Tex-Mex and like the Tex-Mex was so different in San Diego compared to what we have. The thing is, Guzman's more, it's more Tex-Mex-y than Mexican. Yeah. There was only one place I've ever been to in Australia that actually serves like legit interior Mexican food, but they don't exist anymore. It was this fucking place an hour south of Perth. of all places, middle of down safety Bay in the middle of fucking nowhere. Um, and I just, a friend of mine lives there and I was hanging out of her place and, uh, I just, I was walking around and I ended up in their little like downtown, which is like a fucking intersection and a couple of stores. There was a dodgy looking Indian place and a dodgy looking Mexican place. And I was like, all right, which one is probably gives me a better chance of not making me have chronic diarrhea. I went to the Mexican food place and it was so good. The owners would go every couple of years to the Yucatan Peninsula to go to Mexican cooking school and then they bring back all of their recipes. But then I think COVID hit them and they, they had to give it up. But yeah, Tex-Mex, Tex-Mex is all about the cheese, cheese and fried shit. Mexican food is all about the fresh shit. Final question. one book in fitness one book whether it be life business relationship i care but basically two different categories of book what is a book that every coach needs to read for learning better about coaching in any aspect what is a book that people need to read about any other topic oh man that is hard for the training book what would i say what is the what's the name of that book I've got five copies of it all disappeared over the world. Fuck. I can't remember. It's like biochemistry, but it's exercise metabolism by Hargraves. I think every coach should read that. Because like I said earlier, most coaches are learning the surface level shit of sets, reps, exercise selection, order of exercises, splits. But that's not going to give you a true understanding of what's actually happening internally. So to me, it's really important for people to understand the biochemical and physiological consequences, whether that's good or bad to everything you do, because everything that we're programming is providing a stimulus, but we need, if we want to create predictability models and get really good at knowing what the, what's the possible outcome, we need to know how a certain set rep scheme or certain nutritional, uh, setup is going to affect someone chemically because that's going to make the, that's going to basically funnel you to a position of what's good for each person, depending on where they are in their journey. Right. So it's like, if you look at it from a nutritional aspect, biochemistry is biochemistry. If we're talking exercise metabolites, we're talking nutritional biochemistry. It's all the same thing. Just one of them is based on output and its response. And one's based on input and its response. But there, there, but one is if you look at nutritional biochemistry, how does food affect my biochemistry? if I look at exercise metabolism, how does activity utilize the food I've already eaten to create an effect? And I think if people would get read more about that, they would make better decisions on what they're going to do and they would learn how to sniff out bullshit. As far as the non-industry book, I got to promote my number one, Wizard's First Rule. That's the one. Because you got to like fantasy. So it's basically it's philosophy that's wrapped into a nice fantasy story. Oh, I'm going to have to check that out. I'm going to let you know that. So it's basically all about personal responsibility and ownership and doing the right thing. And you don't owe anybody anything. If you want to be charitable, then that's your choice. And it basically be a better human and don't let anybody. Yeah.

Yeah, I tell you can't do this or that or whatever. It's great. That's fucking good. The guy who wrote it, Terry Goodkind, he passed away, I don't know, maybe like six years ago. But this guy was a monster. He would write one full book every year. So there's like 15 or 16 books in this series. And they're monstrous books. They're big. They're not like, it's not like he was fucking around. Yeah. But I highly recommend at least reading that first one. so basically kind of like dostoevsky's work where it's like there's there's like moral meaning inside the story that he's telling like the story yeah so much like we're not going to talk about psychiatry and psychology but like the book itself is discussing immoral points or things yeah so it's like basically as you're going through and following the protagonist he's got all these choices of what he's going to do and it teaches you it's teaching you as you see the consequences of what he does. Yeah. Right. And there's, there's 13 wizard rules. And I like these rules. They're all, like I said, they're all about personal responsibility, personal ownership of your actions. The first rule is the wizard's rule one is people are stupid. It's like they either, they either want to believe things because they either believe things because they want to believe those things to be true. They don't want to believe that they're untrue. That's a fair, fair fucking rule. So it's a good rule against cognitive bias. Yeah, that's a good rule. Yeah. And it's all about letting logic rule, like let logic rule passion. That's a, yeah, that's, I like that book. Wizard First Rule yeah Yeah Terry Goodkind It basically you could say it if i put it on a bumper sticker it like fuck your feelings right be logical not emotional i can get around that that's good uh last question drop everything where we can find you where we can sign up the stuff uh the cerberus the cerberus not cerberus um cerebro cerebro yeah yeah yeah your instagram podcast handles everything um and we'll make sure that all the links are in the description okay so like uh instagram muscle nerds underscore education is what it is now uh my personal account if you want to look at stupid memes uh and you're not easily offended is luke lehman but just don't send me anything industry related there just send me nasty memes and and unpolitically correct videos yeah um yeah we've got our cerebro subscription which is subscription for people to learn it's a big learning platform we have like 18 months worth of videos and I constantly update one or two hours a week on various topics. It's mainly for other coaches, but Gen Pop could get stuff out of that too. We have a really shitty website. We probably need to redo it. MuscleNerds.net Yeah. Info at MuscleNerds.net if anybody wants to inquire for anything. Fantastic, mate. I really appreciate your waffling with me for two hours, I think. Yes, sir. Anyone with a fucking brain that is in the body composition space needs to listen to this episode. obviously just follow you guys and stuff um we're talking about things here that to to me seem like fundamental principles but to us we can tell in the industry it's not and it should be putting your clients health first before a trophy and then letting the trophy come because they're healthy it doesn't seem like it's a no-brainer but it is but yeah we act like it isn't so mate i truly appreciate your time thank you very much it's been a absolute pleasure