553 - Luke Leaman on Individualising Your Calorie Macro Breakdown

19,303 words · 20 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction and Sponsor Messages

CHAPTER 02

Guest Introduction and Background

Welcome back to this episode with Luke Lehman of Muscle Nerds. Luke is a long-time follower, advocate, and basically, I guess kind of like he was mentored for a very long time under Charles Poliquin. But Luke kind of explains the story in this episode of how he went off to do his own thing, which is Muscle Nerds. Outside of that, this podcast is really about the in-depth look at kind of muscle science, training science, nutritional science, and kind of the myths that relate to training, nutrition, and just lifestyle stuff in general, and what really counts and what doesn't count. Because I think it's always interesting to have these evidence-based guys on the show like Brett Contreras, like Brad Schoenfeld, like Dean McKillop. And you can just hear so many different consistencies in what they say. there's no there's a no bullshit approach it's always research based it's always research plus anecdote which i like so much and to be honest when you listen to these podcasts it's kind of like it's safe you know the information that's the way i kind of treat it these days a lot of things unfiltered right so when it's coming through and you guys are listening to it now you know that the information has been filtered through us it's been filtered through guests and our team and we just make sure that everything coming through is true and it's factual and it works. And that's what we love so much about kind of the evidence-based guys. Luke is one of the best guys in the field at this stuff. So, we were super pumped to have him on. Yeah, exactly. Because it's so complicated now, you pretty much just have to find the right sources and then you trust nearly everything they say. Because actually like, you know, verifying every claim, particularly when it comes to strength and conditioning, is like impossible. Yeah, it's impossible. And I'll tell you what else is impossible is like trying to figure out your recovery without work. That's true. You can feel... Okay, so put it this way. you can feel incredible. You can wake up feeling completely energized and then you can hit halfway through the day and absolutely fall apart. Or you can go into the gym and have the worst day in the gym ever and not know why because you woke up feeling great. But with something like WIP, it does give you a more objective insight into how well recovered you are. For example, recently, I had some of the worst night's sleeps that I've ever had but my recovery scores were actually very high. Um, it was just bad sleep in terms of like, I just woke up at the wrong time. I was getting out of bed. I was hot. And what's interesting to see is sleep definitely over a long period of time will affect your recovery, but in a short term two to three day window, not having, okay, so it wasn't terrible sleep, but it was like, you know, 60, 70% sleep. You can still actually, if you dial in nutrition and food and stuff, you can actually hold off and have a good recovery score and actually perform quite well. now it's obviously not a sustainable practice but it's just good getting those sorts of insights to be able to know, okay, recovery scores are still high, sleep hasn't been good but my body is ready to perform right now I think that really does if you kind of look at sports performance say like a UFC fight for example obviously the night before they not going to sleep that well But because they so well they hydrated they ready to go their recovery score can still be quite high going into a fight like that. And so, they can still perform extremely well because the body has ways of kind of adapting to its environment to keep you primed for small windows of time. There's something fascinating I learned with the Wu. What's that? During the rugby game I was watching, my heart rate hit 167. 167 at rest watching a game on TV that's absolutely absurd that's the data you can only know when you track your heart rate 24-7 yeah it's crazy the amount of data that this thing is collecting on us right now as we speak I think is just so insightful it's only if you just trained at all, if you just have any remote interest in your recovery and improving the way you train and your health, something like this is just so much better than just your subjective feelings subjective feelings, yeah they definitely tune up, you become more fine tuned And the longer you've been training, obviously, just the longer you've existed, the more attention you're paying towards it. But ultimately, if you are doing both objective and subjective measures of where you're at, you are going to get incredible results. So, guys, if you go to whoop.com, use our code MINDMUSCLE, you're going to get 15% off your order. I'll throw a bunch of other stuff in there, maybe accessorize, get some cooler bands. If you play sport, get the armband as well. A lot of us, a lot of people have been listening to the show and buying up these whoop bands. So, I think this is like one of those products. It's like, yeah, it's perfect. Like you guys love this stuff. So, we're pumped to have it. All that stuff, if you forget guys, is in the description of this episode. And next one we have is True Coach. So, the other one I use every single day. It's how I get my programming. So, it's individualized programming. That's really the nice thing after. It's like if you program for somebody or you get programming that's individual to you, this is the best platform. I think they really don't have any competition. Yeah, they have some, but it's like, it's null. Yeah, it's like if you're like, what's the best electric car? Yeah, Tesla. Yeah, they are the Tesla. And that's how they've done it. Not for group programs, not for all different stuff, but for individual programming, it is the best one. So, if you get individual programming or your coach is giving you like Facebook or Google Sheets or some stupid stuff like that, for a very, very cheap price, you can just have like a seamless app that delivers the programming. Well, put it this way. Not a single one of our clients have ever turned around to us and said, oh, this TrueCoach thing is like kind of clunky. It doesn't really work. they've all said wow this is so so easy particularly since they got the app yeah app's been huge so we're super pumped about it truecoach.co slash mmp guys how you can pick up that offer you get a free trial and then you get a percentage off your next month so head to the description of this episode and that is where you can find all the links to everything that we just spoke about all right guys here we go with luke lehman all right my muscle project welcome back to an episode that we have been trying to set up for a while now since our usa trip but um Luke, you've been on our radar since I wanted to say the first time we interviewed Dean McKillop which is episode like, what episode is it? 40 something? 42? Yeah, just had it on a throwback but it's been what, 5 years nearly? Yeah, so you've had an interesting journey. You mentioned you were with the Poliquin Group so you're working directly under Charles which we'll get into as well but now you kind of run your own company and if people go explore what the Muscle Nerds principles are about, you'll find it's very obviously scientific evidence-based um a lot of factual stuff out of there a lot of myth debunking which obviously we love as well um so maybe give us the listeners a little bit of a background on kind of that journey with poliquin and then how you transitioned into muscle nerds um and just kind of the path you're on now

CHAPTER 03

Luke's Early Career and Poliquin Influence

okay so i mean if you go back to the start i first heard about charles poliquin when i was a kid right so like we had muscle media at the time the the magazine and the testosterone Trone.net came out. I think now it's TMag.com or something like that. So I started studying his stuff. I was way out in the country in Texas, and I'd been lifting my entire life. I started lifting when I was eight years old and then started powerlifting when I got into high school. So when I was 14. And then obviously gridiron football, and we all trained for that type of thing too. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of information back then. Like right now, everyone's spoiled for information. So if you want to know something, it's easy to find. But then there's also a lot of bullshit you got to kind of sift through too. Like you said, you got to be a bit research-based, but you also have to have experience in the gym. And those are two completely different worlds. There's very few people that put both of those together, which is what we try to do, right? So I started studying Charles of Stuff, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all of these old school guys. And for whatever reason, Charles of Stuff really resonated with me. and I started using his systems and it worked really well and I got brutally strong for powerlifting in high school and also in college and I said, okay, one day I have to go meet this guy, so I saved and saved and saved. In 2007 I went and I did my first PICP level one and my first bioseg sat on that and I was hooked Like the culture that they had at the time was amazing The camaraderie the kind of brother sisterhood type stuff And it was like I like these are my people Like I've grown up my entire life, not having access to people like this that are like me. Because as we know, like back then, like what we do now is pretty common. Back then it was super taboo. Like people didn't work out like they do now. Bodybuilding was really kind of a subculture underground thing. And now it's kind of become a popular thing. A lot of women didn't lift back then. It was nuts. It was kind of the transfer into what we have currently now. And so after I met him and Andre Benoit and some of the other guys, I decided I want to work for these guys at some point. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to work for these guys. And so I put in the hard yards. I was training people, training myself, studying, understanding all of their systems, nutrition, and all that. And then eventually, after a few years, I started working for them as an assistant instructor in North America. So they would call me. I would travel out. I would help teach some of the stuff, talk to students and help instruct and things like that.

CHAPTER 04

Transitioning from Poliquin to Muscle Nerds

And then in 2013, Charles left the company and they brought me in to kind of take over his position teaching bio-sig and as a head lecturer for the PICP program. That went on for a couple of years as I kept getting more educated and kept getting mentored by other people like James LaBelle. I started seeing some things that I didn't like, like some of the stuff we're teaching. I'm like, this isn't really actually factually correct. I don't really agree with this stuff and that created a bit of strife between myself and some of the people in the company And so eventually actually tomorrow september 11th four years ago. I Was let go and I left and at this time um, my my Fiance which we're getting married in february So after four years and we were she had she had quit both of her jobs and sold her car to fly over to america to be with me. And so now I didn't have a job. She didn't have a job. We're like, Oh, what the fuck are we going to do? We didn't have a game plan. It's like, well, well, I don't have to teach anymore. So we've got a little bit of money. I guess we can just go back to New Zealand and go back to Australia. And I can hang out there for both of those places for a few months. And when I, when I announced that I was leaving Pauliken group, we were inundated with all of these people that wanted to work with us, but they didn't want to work with us if we were working with Pauliken group. So we had a guy, a friend of mine in Kuwait, he texted me, he goes, hey, would you like to come teach your kind of your theories and your things around this in Kuwait? And I went, okay, cool. So we did a small seminar in Dubai, didn't want to Kuwait and that paid for us to get, you know, home to New Zealand. We hung out there with Zoe's family for a few months. Another guy called me, said, you want to put on a seminar? I said, yeah. So then we just started putting on seminars and I I started putting together all the content and all the information that I had amassed over 20 years. I've been training since I was 8. I'm 41 now, so it's 30 years of under-the-bar experience, competition experience, plus now getting into the actual research-based type of stuff, right? Actually pulling out textbooks and learning from people like Brian Walsh, Mike T. Nelson, learning biochemistry and cell physiology, and then saying, okay, if I go in the gym and I do this, I know this is what's going to happen, but I want to know why. And I've always been a why guy. Why, if I do five sets of five, why does that differ from doing, say, three sets of 15? So I started unraveling all this, and then I started falling in love with the biochemistry and really with the sports nutrition aspect of it. And I just went full steam into that. So over the last four years, just teaching myself as much about biochem as I can. And now I've kind of done things backwards. I've taught myself a lot of the stuff I need to know, and now I'm going back to school so i'm now getting a graduate diploma in sports nutrition and then going on to a master's of research nutrition so whereas the difference between what i do and what most people do is most people go to college and we learn all this theory but they've never really trained so they go out of college and they have no idea how to apply what they've learned in college well i went and did the bro science thing and i lifted weights and powerlifting and all that and then I now I filled in the blanks with the actual the actual formal education yeah I think that's exactly what happened to me with when I went to university is that I started I opened a gym while I was two years into my degree and then after being two years into business it became impossible to finish a degree because now I knew exactly what I wanted to do and it no longer what I was doing there applied whereas you've done it exactly the opposite way right you've done all the hard yards you've done all the experience and now you're applying the theory to your previous experience which is a great way to do it because there's context to everything you read um and yeah eventually well then you'll know i guess whatever you're reading if it has context for whatever you want to do next which is i guess why you can be so passionate about something studying later in life um i had a follow question though so um now you know we just went before i before i asked this question

CHAPTER 05

The Evolution of Fitness Industry Gurus

i want to say you know i have immense respect for charles and what he did for the industry And I think he had as much of an impact as something like CrossFit in terms of the information he was putting out there So many of his methods like tempo training and stuff, he popularized so many different things. He got girls doing pull-ups and stuff, immense amount of stuff. That being said, he got kicked out of his own company for people who didn't realize. and this isn't about throwing Charles under the bus but I think the point I want to make here or what I think maybe you can shine some light on Luke is that someone like how does you said eventually the stuff they started teaching wasn't factual like and that's something that we started to notice later in Charles Charles's career he started saying some stuff that just started to become outrageous like don't touch receipts because you'll get the ink on you and the ink will cause cancer and stuff like that some outrageous stuff what is it that you see like happens to some of these people that become these massive thought leaders. And then at the start, they're so good. But then eventually, it just becomes this almost guru status. And the information they start giving out is just like so far off because we saw it with Greg Glassman in CrossFit. Some of the stuff he's giving out now is just outrageous. What do you think happened in Charles' situation? You know, it's a trap that a lot of people get into. And I will forever be grateful for the relationship I had with Charles. And our relationship was not good at the end because there was all kinds of strife going on between Pollock and group and him and, you know, uh, myself as to find results, but the other guys got kind of caught in the middle of all that, um, whether we wanted to or not. And so, but I mean, without Charles, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing and I would never have fallen in love with strength and conditioning. I definitely would not have fallen in love with sports nutrition and supplementation and the science behind all that. But you know, the trap I see people get into is exactly what happened on Instagram right now. Like everybody, he was, there's two people I would say that are the best in the world at programming for long-term like Olympic level athletics. And it's Stefan Kozolt and it's Charles Pollock. Like hands down for being able to find systems or other people's types of ways they're doing it. Girona stuff, Reg Park stuff, physical culture. Charles was a massive fan of physical culture, which I am too. And that's something we're losing these days. so he was able to take all these different systems say well how do we periodize them together and make them make sense and put them into uh into a usable system for people right that makes sense he was brilliant at that but the problem is with a lot of people is they want to find what's the new edgy woo-woo shit and it kind of got too much into that where you you start learning from from functional medicine type people right and then they start losing the force for the trees and they start saying, well, the reason you're fat is because the BPA on the receipts that you're holding. No, the reason you're fat is because you're fucking overeating. I mean, that's, you're stressed out and you're overeating and you're probably not moving enough. I mean, that's what it all boils down to. But when people are overweight and they're desperate, they don't want to hear shit like that. They want to hear what is the weird thing, because I don't want to think that it's my fault that I can't stop eating and that I can't control my hunger signals. And for a lot of people, those hunger signals can be so powerful that they they simply can't, but it all boils down to simple basic physiology. But some people want answers and they want it to be something that it's not them. Right. And so there's a lot of people that cater to that. They're like, well, it's probably because you have estrogen dominance or you have a high cortisol. You have this, well, let's find some woo stuff that we can put in our system and trademark that I can then sell. And you see it all over Instagram. Now, especially all these people that want to get into the education side of the business that I'm on, it's like in my day, when I got into it, you were selected to come work and become part of an education company. Now, because of the internet, anybody can start an education company and anyone can make themselves look like an expert, right? All you have to do is watch a YouTube video and then make your own YouTube video. And now you're an instant expert, but what you're doing, it's like, it's like stolen valor. It's like a guy that dresses up like a Marine and puts all of these like a purple heart and all these but they actually were never in the Marines. Like, so you get a lot of people who are teaching things and they don't actually have a portfolio. They don't have a track record and they don't actually understand what they're talking about. Right. I know I'm digressing away from Charles's thing, but there was a thing where, you know, people can get caught in dogmatic beliefs about how they think things work. So if low carb works for me, it has to work for everybody. If Rhonda stuff works for me, it has to work for everybody. So you get stuck into that and you start giving that their money and you start preaching and then it becomes almost like cultish, like a religion. Yeah. So you felt like it just became too good for business to keep going down these side avenues that didn't really have much substance. Well, there was some merit to a lot of the stuff, but there was also the bad that you had to take with that. And, you know, Polycom Group is a supplement company. So in order to sell supplements, you have to come up with ways of selling supplements.

CHAPTER 06

Marketing Tactics in the Supplement Industry

You can take a piece of research and you can say, well, this piece of research says you need to do this because of estrogen dominance or whatever it is. Right. And it's simply a marketing ploy to sell more supplements. And I got caught into that trap because I became one of their salesmen. And, you know, when you're when you're caught in that, you don't realize what's going on. You're like, hey, I'm with an education company. I'm teaching people how to do the right thing. And then you get called out by some other people. like I was called out by Minnow at one point and he and I had some conversations that, well, you've never been to the biosecurity class. You don't really understand what we're saying. And that, that, when that happened, it was after Charles had left and James LaValle had come in and kind of cleaned some stuff up and me and Larry Betado had cleaned some stuff up and it was actually becoming more of a evidence-based or research-based type of system. But there was still a lot of stuff in there that we couldn't prove. So it's like, I didn't feel comfortable then like teaching this stuff. Right. And we're giving people false hope in order to sell a bunch of supplements. And that that became the wrong thing to do for me. And I started realizing that towards the end. You know, but you see it. Everybody's going to have everybody's going to have a predisposition of moving towards that. Right. Especially you get on stage, you become a kind of a fitness celebrity or an industry celebrity. And you're either going to keep doing the right thing or it's going to make you a monster. and I see this all the time where guys that you give them a microphone and they just become a completely different person and it changes their whole world and they become a real dickhead right um but that's that's the current state of our industry right now and new people coming into industry they don't understand they don't have a solid enough science background to understand who's saying the right shit and who's saying dumb shit to them it's all cool and innovative right but you know because that's what sells that's what's that's what's marketable you know if i can come up with new crazy shit and then throw some scientific words out there you can confuse people and they'll buy into anything or any shit you're selling yeah well that's what i always tell people or what we always try and tell people is like okay what is the incentive that someone has for saying that thing and if there is no benefit for them they don't have a dog in the fight it's usually going to be pretty good information assuming that they've experienced them the experienced it themselves. They've put themselves through it. They've worked with other clients that are not like them on it. And they've done the research on it. Whatever the piece of information is in terms of the health and fitness. And there's this one company out there and I don't know why people can't see it. Like they've got a podcast as well. It's quite a big podcast in Australia and it's quite popular and they sponsor like a lot of CrossFit athletes and this and that. This is not True Protein in case anyone was thinking it's our sponsor. But their supplements are just like the craziest woo-woo shit ever like they're just the most retard like a lot of their things are like droppers and stuff like that and i'm like okay there might be some research out there that shows some very very questionable results but they'll get on their podcast and it will just say this one you know why you have adrenal fatigue and then at the end of it it's just this push for their new adrenal product you know it's it's like what like their incentive is to create exactly what you said a new condition, some fancy buzzword, some why you need to be in keto and then sell you their keto product and then sell you their crazy peptide protein shit where it's like, okay, doesn't actually make that much of a difference. Like you said, it's usually down to, okay, you're just like overeating or like you're not controlling your hunger or you're just having too many processed foods or just all crazy shit like that. And it's frustrating for us because a podcast like that gets so much attention and someone will come up to us and be like, dude, have you heard of like the crazy intermittent restricted 5-2 fasting protocol? it's like no it's like well let me tell you about it i was like well let me tell you it's bullshit you know but i mean look i mean that's the supplement industry right so i've been in supplement industry since i was like 16 so i can tell you like it's it's been the same thing since then but back then they were putting drugs and everything so actually worked you look at like the early early ages in 1992 of like eas and myoplex and dan duchesne put out ultimate orange and we had one called Hot Stuff. And if you look at the label, it tasted like battery acid and it had every single thing you could ever put in something but not enough to do anything. And they found out later they were putting D-ball in it and that's what it was. So, I mean, those were wild times, man. But, you know, it's never going to change until – I'm not one for a lot of government intervention because I feel like the industry should sort itself out. and now you have guys like you guys and Jackson Pales and some other guys that are kind of speaking against that type of thing and um and that's what's going to have to happen let the people sort the shit out but you're always going to have a sucker a sucker born every minute you know that they want to they want to believe that the one the one thing that they're missing is some weird ass supplement right or if you look at bodybuilders and palestines the one thing that always missing from them is they just not taking enough drugs right So if they can just take more anadrol that what they missing No what you missing is sleeping more training smarter, eating more or eating less or whatever, right? So, I mean, anytime there's money involved, we're going to have people that do that. And, you know, there are some merits to a lot of the supplements because the industry works in extremes, right? So at one side, you have guys that say, well, I've got three studies that show that our product works. Okay. Well, there's also 20 that shows that it doesn't. And then you have the other side that are saying, well, they only care about the research. Okay. For me, evidence-based means empirical observation. And now do we have peer reviewed research because there's stuff that's just simply not researched yet and probably will never be researched. So you kind of something that Bob Rakowski said to me one time is everyone's an N of one, right? So you just have to try shit to see if it works. And from my perspective is, and the reason I teach what I teach at Muscle Nerds is I want to teach trainers the actual, how the body works. Like there's how your cell works. Here's the biochemistry of things. If you understand how these pathways work just at a basic level, then it gives you a deeper understanding of, well, there's no research to confirm that like this nutraceutical works. But if I look through the research and I see what pathways it starts moving, I can make a best guess of what it's going to do. Now, is it going to be that beneficial? Maybe, maybe not. And for general populace, for most of the people that we all train, is taking something that is going to give you 0.003% advantage, is that going to be worth the cost? Probably not. But for say, in the same boat, it might be worth you know worth taking but i think people are missing the boat there's a i don't i don't talk about a lot of supplements in my courses anymore we stick to just basic shit multivitamin creatine fish oil if you're not eating enough seafood and if you got some digestive issues we might put you on a digestive enzyme for a short period of time just to help right if you're eating in a massively hypercaloric diet i'm probably going to put you on a good digestive enzyme but we pretty much stop at that unless it's super specific and we don't teach it the super specific stuff because none of our students know biochemistry well enough to understand the consequences that if I give you this thing, it's going to do all these downstream things, right? And when we teach the biochemistry, you guys have seen Shrek, right? You've seen Shrek. He's juiced up. He's juiced up for sure. Oh, for sure. But you go back to ogres are like what? Ogres are like onions. Biochemistry is like onions too. There's layers and you keep, When if you take something, you're stimulating layer one and you peel that back. What's going to seem like five or six other things, you peel that back. It's going to stimulate 10 more things. And if I know that something wraps up a pathway, then I can go down the chain and see what all it's going to do. But then we have to prove it or not really prove it. We have to either say we think it works like this or we have to falsify it. So there's a lot of stuff we don't know. And so one of the things that I don't like going into anymore is I don't like being black and white or anything. Everything's gray area. Like you what Jackson has told me, I'm doing a research mentorship with him right now. He's like, we can't actually prove anything. We can only try to falsify things. And we can only research what we can actually measure at this point. So whether there's truth in some of the stuff, truth that's not, you know, what people need to do is stick with the basic shit that's going to get them the most results. Use the 80-20 rule. Work on the shit we know works, you know, like calorie control, making sure you eat enough protein, you know, and then filling the rest in with carbs and fats or whatever you can actually be compliant with. because for most of our clients, the one thing that they're missing is not the next new supplement. It's fucking being compliant and being patient and understanding that to transform your body, to get stronger, to get really lean, to get really massive muscles. This is a long process. And I just actually, my buddy Scott Schutte from America, he posted a quote that I saw today that I reposted on Muscle Nerds Instagram that said, you know, people overestimate what they can do in six weeks and they underestimate what they can do in 10 years. But nowadays, because of social media, everybody wants to be Insta famous. They want Insta results and all this. They don't want to think about where could I actually be in 12 years or 12 months. Don't try to do it in 12 weeks. See where I'm going to be in 12 months. Right. And that's kind of what we preach is play the long game and understand that you need to chip away over time so that you don't push your body to an extreme where it's going to push back extreme to you. Yeah, it's really good points. That like the conversation I had this morning with training with my barber and he in like a it like caught in two situations kind of just gotten back into training He like training really well slowly getting him to like ramp up his calories and stuff And he stuck in this situation where he eight weeks out from his wedding And he's like, man, I think, I feel like I'm putting on too much weight. Like, I just want to start, start a cut for the wedding. And I said to him, I'm like, okay, well, you have two choices, right? You can, you know what the long game is. I'm trying to build you up. We're trying to get calories as high as possible, put on as much muscle mass as possible. Well, then when we strip back some of the calories, you can just do the same amount of activity and the weight will just come off you and you'll look a lot better. You'll just have better shape to you. Your shoulders will be bigger compared to your waist. It'll just be a lot easier. And he's like, well, I want to start the cut. I'm like, but if we start the cut of 1,500 calories, you're going to be at like 800 by the end and it's not going to feel good. I'm like, you're going to be in a shit mood. Your skin's going to be awful. You're not going to sleep very well. your performance in the gym is going to suck you're going to have no energy so it's like this this constant balance and we see that with so many of our gen pop clients when they come in it's like they want to get the result in eight weeks and it's almost like you kind of have to sell them that in a way so it's kind of saying yeah we're going to do that but we're going to play the long game at the same time and it's just that that tightrope that you just walk with the population is trying to get them a fast result so that they buy into what you're doing but also at the same time not jeopardize the long game don't get caught in the cycle of just like extreme calorie cutting reset extreme calorie cutting reset i mean the way i see it is you can either do it fast or you can do it right you can very rarely do both of those things at the same time right but like you know if you're looking at something like that where you know you could make it you can make a big push at low calories but you can you can you can only do that in a very short period of time especially 1500 calories, you know, you go down to 800 calories and all of a sudden your, your weight loss stalls. Okay. Well, you're no longer in a calorie deficit, but where do you go from there? Okay. And that's not enough. I mean, you're basically chip you're, you're, you're chipping into that RMR. And so the body has to figure out how do I survive on this many calories? Okay. Let me get rid of everything. That's not essential. Okay. Growing nice hair, skin and nails, not that essential. Your hair starts thinning and falling out, having a nice hard boner. That's not that essential. Having sex, not essential. Get rid of the libido, right? And you start getting these issues where you start toning down hormones because you're in such a catabolic state that your body just wants to try to survive and not thrive. And that's what people have to understand, right? You hear people like Lane Norton, he says, well, if you're not losing weight at 800 calories, you're not actually in a deficit. That's absolutely correct. But at that point, where do you go from there? Yeah, like only resort, take your calories back up the maintenance. Okay, try to get try to get all those components of your total daily energy expenditure re-regulated, we have to create a new maintenance. And then we start another deficit, right? So I like some of the stuff that like Jackson is doing on intermittent, intermittent dieting, where, you know, they just did the ice cap study where they've gone three weeks low, and then one week of maintenance. And I think, from my experience, that's probably going to be a good, a good way of doing things like push hard for three weeks, but then come out of it for a week and then push our threes and then say, okay, instead of a 12 week transformation, we're going to do a 12 week transformation, but we're going to put in a maintenance week every three or four weeks that we bring out. And so it's actually going to be 16 weeks. And so just take your time with it. And I personally like to do it in a very long manner. Like for me last November, I was 110 kilos and I said, okay, I want to get this off. I want to build my physique the way it used to be. I don't want to lose my performance. I also don't want to rebound. I also like chicken nuggets and aioli. I also like wine. So I'm not, I don't want to have to give those up because that's part of my lifestyle for my sanity. Right. And so over that time, I set a goal of like, I'm going to chip away 350 grams a week, a weight a week on average, and I've nailed it completely. And that's what people should do. They should plan a little bit better and they need to work on how many grams do I need to lose per week to get to my goal. And now is my goal realistic? You know, uh, to losing two kilos a week. Is that realistic? Not really. Can it be done? Absolutely. But you're going to sacrifice performance and health and you're going to sacrifice some lean body mass. Your sleep's going to suffer. Your guts are going to get worse. Your hormones are going to get screwed. so why why rush it if you know that two months after your transformation you're just going to blow back up and you're going to have to redo it again it doesn't make any sense but that's that's not what's being sold on instagram yeah look at my all week transformations but they're not showing the after the after pic yeah and then they're taking so many photos in that one week that they just use it for the rest of the year yeah you always see that you see it's you see with the fitness girls, right? So the fit girls, you'll see pictures, it like is it always a throwback Thursday Because I not seen any And then you show up at a bodybuilding show and you see them and you like you don look like your pictures right now It like oh yeah yeah yeah I'm in my off season. I'm like, you sure are. It's a big off. I'm going hard in this off season. Yeah, right? No, it's, yeah, some good points, really good points.

CHAPTER 07

Flexible Dieting and General Population Clients

I want to ask, we kind of having discussion before this about the impact of flexible dieting the IFYM principles on Gen Pop. So it's like, okay, you know, client comes into the gym, they are very inconsistent. Some days they have breakfast, some days they skip breakfast. They might have four or five cups of coffee a day. They don't sleep. They don't drink enough water. Don't eat vegetables. They've got all these problems. And then I think a lot of trainers in the industry have so much discipline and they've done dieting for so long. They've trained really well and they themselves are nothing like their clients. They don't realize that yet, right? They don't have the experience. And what's worked for them is they go, okay yeah i want to have this pizza i'm just gonna like build it into my calories i want to have this burger build it into my calories i want these twizzlers and twinkies or whatever it is uh i'm i'm disciplined enough to eat all my vegetables and tick all my protein boxes and then fit this treat in at the end and they try and use that on their clients and we were guilty of it ourselves we'd go to people oh no food is evil like you can just kind of eat whatever you want but kind of disgusting i don't feel like that doesn't really work with gen pop clients because they miss so many of the big low-hanging fruit at the start so what do you think of that when applying those principles to gen pop well i mean look it's not just gen pop that this problem like we train gen pop but we specialize in training other coaches and i can tell you personal trainers have no idea how fucking food works man and we tried i didn't want to have to write people meal plans when we started i said okay coaches should understand flexible dieting they should be able to pick a protein from a list and then understand how to weigh it and track it and things like that. And we, it was disastrous. Like you would have, if they were from the physique side of things, they were pretty good, but everybody else sucked. So it got to a point where we said, okay, we've got, we have to make layers of this and we have to make progressions and regressions, just like you would with exercises, right? If I can't do a Bulgarian split squat, I can regress it to feet flat. If I can't do that front foot elevated. So I said, okay, we have to have that for dieting structure as well. If I give you your calories and your macros and I say, okay, I want you to eat four to five meals a day. Here's how I want you to structure it. Pick off this thing. And I also want you to try to track this. They couldn't do it. So it got to a point where how do I regress that back? Okay. I'm going to have to simplify this until we get to a point where I'm going to have to tell you exactly what to eat for a short period of time. So you actually understand how to track properly and how to follow instructions and also how food works. and then we'll take him from a couple, two or three months of doing that and then we'll say, okay, we're going to start trying a little flexible dieting, pick off this list for a little bit of time. Then we start talking to him about, okay, now you can pick things off the list. If you want to have Twizzlers, if you want ice cream, let's build that into your program, right? So if you have some calories left over at night and you want to have like my favorites, like white chocolate raspberry ice cream, if I have 400 calories at the end of the day I know that if I weigh out say 200 grams of that I can have that that's not a problem right considering too I'm dieting right now I'm losing by so I have to be more meticulous with my tracking losing weight and also eating for Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition I have to I have to tick all those boxes and you know that's something that people aren't doing too is ticking the boxes like making sure you get all the all the fluids you need every day making sure that you're cutting your caffeine off at a certain time so that you sleep better making sure that you try to eat a fistful of veggies or more at each meal those are boxes have to be ticked off and if they're not taking those boxes off we can't over complicate their their program by giving them too many choices because when you give a human free will and allow them to have too many choices they start doing stupid shit until they understand how this stuff works right

CHAPTER 08

The Pitfalls of Intuitive Eating

yeah like uh um you know they you hear the whole movement of intuitive eating intuitive eating oh yeah not enough people enough to eat intuitively because if if i didn't understand my food eating intuitively i would intuitively whatever the fuck i want right so at some point we have to say okay at what level of consciousness are you at because you've got four basic levels right you've got you've got you know subconscious incompetence where you're incompetent but you don't realize you're incompetent And then we have to get you to the point where you're consciously incompetent. Okay, now I understand where I'm fucking up Then you get to the point of conscious competence where they know what's going on. They're not screwing up They know how to track They're consciously aware of what they should be doing and they're ticking the boxes and then eventually You get to the point where you have a lot of high-level personal trainers of the guys where they have subconscious competence They can just eat they can look at

CHAPTER 09

The Pendulum of Nutritional Trends

it's all a pendulum it's either going to swing extreme one way or extreme the other so like um in the in the 60s and 70s the 50s 60s 70s it was kind of like keto high fat low carb type stuff then they said okay that's killing everybody okay cool. So in the late seventies and eighties and part of the nineties, it was all low fat, high carb. Well now carbs killing everybody. So now we've swung the other way. Everybody's so totally keto. It's like, for fuck's sake, can this pendulum just, can we just find some middle ground in here and just look at what is actually really important and nail that. But the problem is again, that's not marketable. So you have people out there, you have, you have all of the top research guys, you got Alan Aragon, you have Lane Norton, you have all these guys saying, look, if you get your calories correct get your protein correct it doesn't really fucking matter carbs and protein i mean carbs and fat as long as it fits in you're going to be okay if you're playing the long game and that's true but that's not sexy to people they're like they they want to belong to a group so i'm either going to be a keto person or a paleo person or a vegan person or a carnivore person it's like there's elements of all your guys dieting that works really well and there's some real fucked up to toot about some of the stuff you guys are doing why don't you look at all those diets and say, hey, I bet if we combine all this stuff and use some common sense that we could probably find a good way of eating, which we already know how that is, but no one wants to buy it. No one wants to buy health. They want to buy religion, nutritional religion or training religion or whatever the hell you do or supplementary religion. Nobody wants to just understand that, dude, if you just be really fucking consistent and track your shit over time, you'll probably get where you want to go. And if you don't, then it's probably a medical issue or nutrient deficiency that's out of scope of practice for your trainer to even diagnose for you. And you need real help from a qualified doctor that understands nutrition as well or a dietician. But that's the hard thing. What we're selling at Muscle Nerds, it's not a sexy thing to say, hey, we're going to teach you basic fundamental things that you guys should already fucking know before you try to get in all the complex shit. and and from the from the training perspective as well obviously i feel like the nutrition stuff is yeah you get you definitely get the uh the religious camps part of it was just because you know a lot of people they don't so many people are depressed and lonely these days i think it's like wasn't it read somewhere the average american over 24 like it's like 50 percent of them say that they're alone like they don't have a friend or a partner which is crazy right so i guess when people find something like this that they don't can be their friend yeah well it's just like the keto camp becomes their new religion like you said right they find all these people and they all agree on something they all go hard in this area and yes maybe for a lot of people that weren't doing anything it is a better change maybe they're cutting out a lot of shit in their diet and so that they are getting some health initial health results um but the long game it just it just makes everything worse but um

CHAPTER 10

Training Philosophy and Movement Variety

on the training side of things it's been a lot of like we've gone through a lot we've gone through bodybuilding powerlifting olympic lifting crossfit all this different stuff and then we kind of come out the other side and you know we're not we started in a camp we started in the crossfit camp especially when we started this podcast and our gyms and now we're kind of moving away but you still see a lot of people they hang on to it they want to they want to be a part of this religion but it's not serving them it's not the best for them their knees still suck their shoulders still suck their backs blown out but they love it for you from the muscle nerd side what what is it about training that you guys preach uh we preach you know you should do the training that you enjoy doing i mean and that you don't have to do anything if you don't want to if look if you if you like to power lift knock yourself out but don't tell everybody that's the only way to do it if you're a power lifter or bodybuilder and you hashtag fuck cardio and you tell people that cool that fine and now you can see all these guys having strokes and they on dialysis they having all these issues because they not taking care of the health aspect of things right do you need this stuff to get lean you don need you don need a fucking squat to get lean you don't need to lift weights to get lean i haven't lifted weights in the last fucking nine months i've lost 14 kilos so and i went in we just bought a bunch of equipment put it at the house and i was like i wonder if i'm still as strong as i was when i started dieting i was benching 125 i I went in the gym. I benched 120. I haven't fucking bench pressed in nine or 10 months. It's been all cardio. It's been aerobic conditioning. It's been my diet. It's been jiu-jitsu. That's all I've done because after lifting weights for 30 years, I didn't want to lift weights anymore. I was like, I can't fucking do another squat or another pull-up. I need something else. I found something I enjoyed. I enjoyed choking motherfuckers out. I did that. right now that now that i bought this atlantis equipment now it's like okay i can go in my gym in my underwear and i can go do pull-ups on it so i just started training like two weeks ago and now i'm enjoying it again right so i'm going to start doing a little bit more that but people need to just find something that they fucking enjoy and stop listening to people that say you have to do something right um

CHAPTER 11

Critiquing the 'Primal Movement' Narrative

you have to squat it's the king of lower body exercises why do you have to squat it's a primal movement it's a primal movement to squat down and take a shit it's not a primal movement to squat down with 100 kilos on your back, right? You think that's natural, you're fucking retarded. Something's wrong with you, right? If you think that's the case, then install a squat rack on your toilet. And every time you take a shit, squat down with 100 kilos on your back. Stop telling people these are normal natural movements and they have to do it if they really want to be strong and healthy, right? Because if you look at things like the squat, there is only one sport on earth where the squat is a specific physical preparation exercise and that's powerlifting. Okay. For all other sports, it's a very good tool to develop lower body strength to transition into your sport. Right. So, um, that's the thing, like our kind of thing is if you know enough about the body, you realize there's many roads to roam and you need to pick the training that you're going to get enjoyment out of because you're more likely to actually do it multiple times a week. You know, when I was in my twenties, I, again, I came from the camp where if you couldn't fix it with squats and fish oil, you're probably going to die. and I made everybody had to squat, you know, so God would roll in in a wheelchair and, you know, can't, can't, can't move his legs from the leg down. I'd be like, that's no excuse getting the squat. Right. I realized now, I realized now, like I was a real asshole. Like I love to squat. Not everybody likes that. And not everybody has the orthopedic profile to do it correctly. So there's no inherent reason to do that. If you can't squat, great. You got the hack squat, you got the leg pressure, you got split squats, you got step ups, you know, you got lunges, you got fucking booty blaster hip extension shit. You got a reverse hyper, you got back extension, you got all sorts of other things you can use. If you hate a movement or hate an exercise or hate a style, then don't fucking do it. Right. Do something you're going to love and you're going to be consistent at. And I think that's probably the best advice for most people. You know, I think that obviously I'm a, I'm a meathead at heart. I started lifting weights when I was eight. Everyone should probably lift, but everyone should also take care of the cardiovascular respiratory system and take care of the things that give them the energy to lift harder, faster, and better, which is take care of your mitochondria, get your stress down, take care of your lungs and your heart and your vascular system. And then yes, also resistance training. So you keep high quality of muscle and then understand that you should probably, you should probably lift in ranges that work every muscle fiber, meaning that yes, yes, you do still need to lift weights for your type one fibers. Yes, you need to lift for the type two and yes, you need to lift for the type two X, But then you have to keep that in context too, because we have to say if Mary Muffintop comes in, does she need to do single one rep max in the squat? Probably not. So we've got to say, okay, what's our range of where we can lift where you still get strong enough to stimulate those fibers, but not to a point where it becomes risky and dangerous with somebody who can't chew gum and walk at the same time. Right. So, I mean, I can go on for hours and bitch about this, but it's just because I've, like I said, I've come from the bro side first and I've, I've preached the dumb shit and the shit that doesn't make sense. And now that I've gotten, you know, more research based and textbook based, I realized like, man, like some of the stuff I used to have people doing was completely unnecessary. and there's no wonder I had a lot of client turnover, you know, because I was making them do things that they did not want to do and it was completely unnecessary to make them do that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of it as well, it's like people, when they start their journey in health and fitness at this point, it's almost like, okay, anything works as long as whoever's teaching it to them or whatever keeps them safe. So obviously like the first thing is the injury right Like you never want to go do something that just going to fuck you up And and then you like all right all movement is bad and now they can walk So like considering that whatever they do they ease into it and they do it correctly i think is really good

CHAPTER 12

The Rise of Group Fitness and Expectations

i think for a lot of people it just takes a while for them to build up to the point where they ready to like lift weights i know that's why like f45 orange theory barry's boot camp xyz whatever these group fitness gyms are they they do such a good job of just lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible. My only issue with it is that if someone is going to, I think they're just, their expectations are a little off as to what results they might get. And that is just because of the marketing, right? That's just because if you look at the marketing for these gyms, the guys that are in that marketing, I know for a fucking fact that guy benches. I know for a fact he does strict press and back squat and deadlifts and he does hill sprints and stuff. He's jacked, you know? You look at him and the trainer there is like, man, we just hit a crazy leg day. and this guy is jacked and i'm like there are no weights in your gym like i'm looking then there's treadmills and tiny dumbbells like i know for a fact you did not get quads like that on the treadmill yeah yeah it's just it's just one of those things where the expectation is wrong that's and that's my only issue with it is obviously they're just selling something which just isn't reality and look enough people go through these gyms every now and then you'll get some guy with amazing genetics that when he does battle ropes his biceps grow you know or his delts start to pop it's just kind of how it goes. Or it might be a guy that maybe he's 50 now, but he was an all-star athlete in high school and university, and that muscle was already built, and then he touches something, boom, he blows up. It's me. I've lifted for so long that the minute I lift weights, I'll put on seven kilos in a week just going in and doing a few workouts and eating a little bit more because I built that muscle early on, so it's just sitting there dormant waiting to be used, and the minute I use it, it responds, right? But, you know, so there's a lot of different factors that can be in it. And, you know, with those types of places, they're catering to people that, you know, they're intimidated by going to a big gym. They're intimidated by going to a high-performance facility where you probably got some guys walking around with chalk and grinding and throwing dumbbells and just acting a fool. That's not very marketable. That's why Planet Fitness does so well in the United States, you know, and people talk shit about Planet Fitness. I had a Planet Fitness membership. Why? Because I was in contest prep and there was one two minutes from my house. And it was easy for me to go there and knock out a Smith machine bodybuilding workout or get on the treadmill and do my cardio or whatever. And I loved it because, A, I was the most jet motherfucker in the gym. The gorilla has arrived. And, B, I didn't have to deal with any douchebags. All the equipment was always immaculate. It was always well-maintained. It was all – there was – the dumbbells were always in the right spot, you know. So there was a real high benefit to that. But as I've gotten older, I've decided not to be such a dick about what other people want to do and about facilities. And we do some stuff with F45 as far as our clinic in Bloomington treating people and things like that. But do I agree with everything they do? Absolutely not. But you know what they do well is they create a community and they get people in the door. like people they and they want to come and they want to to move and that's what people really need to do is move more but you know in my experience in the industry the people who who demonize certain things it's always because they're not good at those things so if you say like uh there's a lot i i'm certified in animal flow and i love animal flow it's not for everybody i like it you know but you'll get like these power lifters who are like animal flow so stupid crawling around the ground they don't like it because the reason they don't like it is because if they get on the ground on their back they can't get up they're like a fucking turtle and they can't they can't reach around and wipe their ass they have to go between their legs so they they demonize because they know they can't do it and you know once you get over your ego and realize that that shit's pretty cool man being able to do handstands and be able to do like move through different planes of movement that's probably what people need the most combined with a little bit of solid strength training and say we say okay everything we have is a tool we just use the right tool for the right job yeah i mean the more i just restrict the amount of movements that i'm doing in my training and the less range of motions that i load and pass through the worse i feel like yeah i can still look good you know i can still have the muscle mass and be lean and stuff but you just don't feel as good like your hips your hips hurt more your back hurts more your shoulders are tighter like everything just becomes a little bit just worse like you hang on the bar i used to hang like stretch free but now i get like a real tearing sensation through my pecs i'm like this is just because like you're just so limited in your training and i just think so many people like you said are scared they just avoid it because you know a big part of it is that people don't want to embarrass themselves they're also in the gym and they're like i don't want to try this new thing that i could be bad at because i'm such a badass when i squat and everyone stares at me and i feel good but now if i have to drop down and you know go into dog and stretch out my hamstrings and I look like I A pool of sweat underneath Yeah The ego stops them People don't want to get on a machine they don't know how to use, right? They're like, oh, what do I do? What if I do it wrong? People will... That's why they stand near it for ages, just looking at people use it until they're 100% confident how to use it correctly. Like the skier. People don't know how to use the skier, so they just leave it. It's a really effective tool, but it's the same principle across all things that people don't want to try. they don't want to embarrass themselves so they stick to what they're good at and as a result that's their detriment so the best thing we can do as trainers as coaches as mentors to these people is like make it as like don't no judgment on on any of the stuff just make it a friendly welcoming environment so that everyone feels like they can try and fail and learn because you know a lot of people are really intimidated coming into the gym it's so easy to forget that day one they're like okay, it's okay to fail here because it's normal and I can get better. A hundred percent. And you know, it's just, it's like you said, it's that ego thing. It's that ego. And you know, you get people who they struggle just to get to the gym because they're so intimidated. And then you're laughing at them because they don't know how to use the machine or you're laughing because they're doing some weird rotational movement. And you know, you look at these guys that are there, they live in the sagittal plane and when they have to get out of that plane, they're completely screwed. Right. So, you know, we need to think about, you know, sagittal plane movements. Great. We need that. If you want to get strong, you're going to need that stuff, but that's not the only plane there is. And you should probably, as a human that, that, that craves movement, you should be learning how to move in all the different planes. You've got to be able to flex and rotate and get up and down off the ground. And you know, that type of thing. And that's when you show people doing those types of movements, the hardcore lifters start laughing at them and they're like, well, that's stupid. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, look how internally rotated and how abducted your shoulders are. And like you're, you're hyperflexed in your, uh, in your elbow flexors because your shoulders so tight that you can't straighten your arms and you can't reach overhead to change a light bulb. It's like, like I would, I would rather be strong enough and also be able to move enough and be conditioned enough and, and feel awesome, you know, and prioritize stuff that's really going to matter like sleep and digestion. And, you know, there's all these other things that, that, that go into, I hate the word holistic, but go into a holistic kind of program that's above and beyond the squat bench deadlift and overhead press. Right. Um, but you know, when you're younger, that's all you care about really is looking bad-ass and lifting lots of weight and doing big high jumps on a fricking 30, 36, 40 something inch box or whatever, you know, and some people eventually grow out of that. and some people won't let it go because that's their identity and they're scared to let go of their identity and grow as a person you know if and that was me man in when I was 24 25 I was 100 and it was 123 kilos oh I had abs like not a shredded but I you know I was it so big I'd walk in somewhere people would stop and look at me and at that time that was my identity I was I I started lifting weights because I got bullied. So I thought, well, if I get as big as possible, no one will fuck with me. It's not actually true. If you do that, people will fuck with you more. When you leave high school and alcohol is involved, the smallest dude will be the drunkest dude. He's the one that's going to start a fight with you, right? So I put on this gorilla suit to kind of try to keep the world away from me. And then you start getting attention, and you're like, hey, this is kind of pretty cool. you know? Um, but,

CHAPTER 13

Luke's Personal Shift Toward Longevity

and then you just get completely, absolutely dysfunctional. And it wasn't until my mid thirties where I was like, I don't have to be that guy anymore. I would actually probably rather feel amazing. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of all this excessive weight that I don't need. I'm going to get my blood pressure down. I'm going to get my heart rate down. I'm going to prioritize sleep and trying to move better again. And, and I just never looked back, man. And I really don't want to like, sometimes I crave, like I'd love to get under a 320 pound squat or 300 kilo squat. And I'd love to squat that again. I'd love to deadlift 335 again, you know, but it's just not a priority to me anymore. I don't justify my self-worth by being, by people going, Ooh, look how, look how strong you are. I'd rather people look at your merits and your character and other things and say, wow, this guy moves really well. He's got a really nice physique. He's conditioned. He's nice. He's, you know, he's helpful and things. those those are the things as I've aged it's become more important to me it's like helping other people being helpful you know serving others and then taking care of my health so I get another for hopefully another 40 50 years on this planet of feeling amazing hmm

CHAPTER 14

The Psychology of Muscle and Identity

I think what you just touched on there so important and I think it's such a hard thing to realize like even you know we're still like in our late 20s now and it's still one of those things where it's like you're trying to prove it to

CHAPTER 15

Chasing Challenges vs. Chasing Comfort

And I heard Joe Rogan say this on a video the other day is that we're too busy chasing comfort because we think that that's going to make us feel better. What we need to be doing is chasing challenges and goals and trying to put ourselves in a position of being uncomfortable and working our way out of it and that's really what what we're what we're instinctively tuned to do is to overcome overcome obstacles but people don't want to overcome obstacles anymore they want us to be very comfortable right we need challenge to grow yeah i guess that's why you took on such a difficult field of study and in such a you know a point in life where people say oh you're too old to learn yeah i mean shit man how many people go back to school 40 years of age and you know more people should, right? But that to me, that's my drug. That's my addiction now. Like sit, sitting and watching lectures and reading textbooks and, and, and then trying to create new things. Like people always say there's nothing left to create in the industry. That's bullshit. There's nothing left to create. If you don't understand the body enough to create something like I had a, I had a guy that flew in. He's, he's finishing his osteopath school and he does, he comes to our house and he stays with us for two or three days every few weeks and we do a mentorship thing and we came up with a ton of new treatment protocols and a lot of new ideas about things that we were finding just some of it was by accident some of it was by thinking about what's connected to what maybe if we do this it changes this and then we try it and we're like oh that's crazy i've never seen that before and you know there's still plenty of room to grow and create things if you get the foundational knowledge enough to be able to create something yeah absolutely yeah i need those principles

CHAPTER 16

Analyzing the Vegan Diet Trend

I don't want to forget this before we jump into our final questions, but with the vegan diet obviously on the rise at the moment, a lot of it's propagated by Netflix putting out so many different documentaries. there's obviously an underlying agenda i feel like there's a big push for potentially certain vegetables or plant proteins which will become patent or they already are which they can monetize and sell better than than meat because you obviously can't really patent a cow or a pig or anything like that so what do you see is like the main issues with the vegan diet and what do say is good about it as well well i mean we've got again go back to my 20s i would have been like oh that's stupid blah blah blah blah but over time i've changed a lot of my ideas i think the vegan diet's great um i think it's better if you add a little bit of meat to it but if that's not your option that's how we tell people to eat like a vegan a good vegan because there's good vegans there's bad vegans eat like a good vegan and then garnish it with meat whereas in my 20s it was like eat like a carnivore and garnish it with veggies. I think that we really should be eating more of a plant-based diet. But for me, plant-based doesn't mean meat-free. It means eating more plants, a lot more plants, and then eating enough protein, right? And people probably do over-consume protein. And not Gen Pop, but trainers tend to over-consume protein, right? And that's been a real mind-blower for me because I've done some vegan experiments with myself. Let me do, and I even took it extreme i did ketogenic vegan just to see what what would happen right and i didn't die and i didn't get weak and i didn't lose all my muscles so you know it's the same thing with training you should find the eating style that resonates with you but don't pass that off as as it's healthier than something else right because it's clearly not um but um i just totally lost my train of thought but but is it more isn't it more inconvenient for average people though is it like takes more preparation so if they can't drink water and eat enough you know eat enough protein to begin with surely limiting your protein options makes it more difficult for gen pop let's make it more difficult and like to be able to be a good vegan it takes a lot of work there's some efficiencies you have to work out you know there's milk combining and things like that but like we have a vegan on our staff marx o'farrell and she did it for our program design class she She does a small lecture on veganism, like how to work with vegans, because that's something that if you're not a vegan, you really don't understand what they're going through. And one of the things she said that was really powerful to me is you not gonna be able to change someone belief system right So and vegans have they vegan because of any number of reasons right Maybe it because in in her case she loves animals and wants to end animal suffering. You're not going to change that belief system. So you have to learn how to work with them and how to make that a healthier option. Or if you're not comfortable with that, you refer out, right? Um, if you're doing it because you think it's the healthiest diet, you're not right, right? The healthiest diet is a balanced diet. And there's certain things that we're going to get out of animal protein, you simply can't get out of eating plant proteins, especially some of these new fake plant proteins, right? You know, but by the same token, like, these guys doing the carnivore diet, I think they're going to find out that's going to be disastrous eventually, because you still need some plants, like you still probably need to get some fiber and phytonutrients and things like that. So it's like, it's like the saying goes, you know, there's three sides to every story. There's your side, my side, and somewhere in the middle lies the truth. So we don't want to over consume any one thing. We don't want to under consume something. We want to eat everything in a balanced diet. But if, if, if veganism is something that, uh, resonates with you, uh, resonates with your soul and that's the way your belief system set up, then that's fine. You just got to learn how to do it correctly, but don't push it on someone else. Like this is like religion. If you're a Christian, don't push that on me, right? If you're a Buddhist, don't push that on me. If you're Muslim, don't push that on me. Like I'm, I'm agnostic, so I don't know what to fucking believe so the last thing i want somebody to do is pushing their agenda on me so if you're gonna if you're going to subscribe to some belief system for the way you should be eating i'm great i i love that don't fucking push it on me yeah that's a good point and a lot of the um what's got really popular as well recently i think with the vegan diets is the meat substitutes uh do you find that that stuff is terrible like if you're going to use it i'm okay like if you want to use a meat substitute like what's already out there like you know a black bean patty or corn patty or something. Okay, knock yourself out. But this new fake shit they're coming out with, like the Beyond Burger and all this other stuff, when you actually look at the ingredients, man, it's a clusterfuck of stuff. And it's expensive. It's more expensive than beef, and it's less nutritious, right? And there's really no reason to do any of that stuff now because they have plenty of really good vegan protein powders. Like I use a protein powder by Thorne that's vegan, some of their medical food shakes it's nice it's well balanced um you can a couple of those and you can be halfway to your protein goal right there and then you can easily fill the rest up with beans and quinoa and whatever else yeah it's interesting i will um be experimenting with it next week yeah i'll tell you more about later but um no that's been that's been some good stuff so um look we uh did we send luke questions fantastic all right look you are prepared for these questions so first question is um

CHAPTER 17

Rapid Fire Questions: Elon Musk

if you had an opportunity to sit down and interview anyone that is alive today who would you choose and why no i had i had to think long and hard about this right and and who i would actually want to sit down with um i think i'd want to sit down with elon musk that would be awesome i'd love to sit down with him and just play video games like i think that'd be cool right like uh i'm not i'm not uh i'm not a big weed guy but uh I'd smoke a blunt with him. I'd eat some mushrooms or acid with him. I think that would be like the best night ever. That and, you know, I'd love to talk to him about space and where SpaceX is going and what their plans are and how they're going to actually get to Mars and where he sees like the next 40 or 50 years of space exploration going. And I'd also like to ask him about Neuralink. I'd like to ask him if I could get on the list and be one of the first people to get Neuralink installed in the mind. into my brain so that'd be freaking cool it's either going to be one of those conversations or one of those nights with him where you come out of it really optimistic about the future or really really pessimistic about the existence and what's going to happen i think it'd be mind-blowing man just like listening him on joe rogan podcast was great i've listened to that a few times and then sometimes like watching videos of him when he's when he's on stage with other people and some of the faces he makes when they say weird dumb shit i think i think the guy's brilliant man Yeah. It's a once-in-a-lifetime sort of person, especially to live through his era. He basically has revolutionized the auto industry. It's not going to be long now until they're self-driving and electric. It's just crazy to live through this time. I guess there's always crazy inventors, right? It's always like Isaac Newton and Einstein, all these different people. Everyone would have lived through their time and be like, man, it's crazy that he did this and he changed this and did so much for us and like this is just our version it's just the 2019 version of you know the newtons and the einsteins yeah and like to talk to somebody who everyone said you can't do this or can't do that and he said here hold my beer right just say fuck it i'm gonna do it anyways and yeah right i i a i a an extremely odd person and so i like hanging out with fantastically weird people and he is just you can you can get weirder than that guy Yeah it about as weird as I come The best bit would be if you had the meeting with him and then everyone was like, oh, what'd you ask him? Like, oh, we just played video games. Didn't really get to any of the questions. What's your high score on Galaga? Let's go. Nice. Okay, so

CHAPTER 18

Daily Habits and Success

second question is, what is something that you do or you try and do every single day that you feel like contributes a lot to the success of your day? Oh, man. I was talking to Zoe about this because I'm a horribly unstructured person. I'm not a scheduled person where she is. And so I think probably the only thing that I do every day that I have to do is I have to learn something new. I have to study something. And I have to at least – I got to masturbate, crank one out at least once. Clear the mind. And play with my dogs. As long as I'm home, right? But I can still masturbate and study when I'm traveling, you know, not at the same time. Learning that new protein pathways while stroking it. You know, it's hard for me to have structure because I travel so much. If you're always in different places, it's hard to tell. I mean, coffee is always a have to have. I'm not going to have a successful day if I don't have some coffee at least. has it been um has it been hard to go back to i assume you travel back to the states to teach as well to drink american coffee now that you're on australian coffee yeah man it's it's hard it's rough yeah americans are like oh starbucks i'm like man that is shit i'll drink it if i have to but it's difficult yeah yeah 100 yeah no it's almost like a different drink like you go over there and you just accept okay i'm not going to get good coffee because you just if you have an expectation that you're going to find somewhere in america with good coffee it's just wrong it's the wrong expectation it's not going to happen sadly disappointed yeah sadly disappointed um and if you just go okay this is just like the coffee i'm going to be drinking over here you're fine because you don't have yeah you just don't have the wrong expectations and then every now and then someone might throw you a gift and you're like oh wow that was actually like okay yeah but americans don't know how to order coffees now like i've learned and i've had i've had to learn since I've been overseas because you walk in you say hey give me a coffee and they're like what kind you're like what what do you mean just pour it out of the little thing like I just want coffee and now it's like a pickle or cappuccino or this that and I'm like holy shit you know don't even know how to order and then you have to learn like how to order them in different countries like from here it's a long black in the in the UK it's an americano and it's like fuck man you can't keep up you're just so now I just order those all the time because that's that's pretty standard everywhere piccolo i didn't know that i drink picks over here but i didn't know they had them in america maybe i'll try next time but oh no i did it was they do know that we were there like what that was an espresso yeah go to america and ask for americano they will have no idea what you're talking about like ask for a piccolo they will have no idea what you're yeah no idea yeah that's what we experienced yeah it's difficult um okay third question luke is uh what is something recently seems like you do this a lot but what is one of the more recent things you changed your mind on that you held as a strong belief recently recently recently man that's uh that's a tough one i mean i've there's so many that's been over the years like going from being a low-carb zealot to being like kind of like the switzerlandan nutrition and saying hey man look all these all these things work they might work better at different times but realistically you just got to be consistent one of the things is like tracking like really getting on the tracking because i was always kind of uh well you know if you eat clean, you're fine. And then I'm like, okay, now that I'm tracking, got other people like that's super important. Um, it's something I wanted to say earlier that I didn't is we've gotten into trouble a little bit with people lately because we've been talking about, look at the, at the base level of things you have to, you have to know what you're eating, right? You have to, you have to respect calories at some time. Uh, and tracking is a part of that. People like, I don't get my clients to track. That's bullshit, blah, blah, blah. It's unnecessary. That's dieting culture. But the thing is, tracking is not synonymous with dieting. Tracking is about consistency and accuracy and understanding what you're doing. So those are two completely different things. I can track and not be dieting. I just want to see what, you know, what I'm doing. So I mean, there's a lot of things that I can't really think of anything lately. It's just, There's new things I've been learning that I'm layering on with some of the other stuff I've learned, especially about pathways through biochemistry, where I'm like, okay, I've been teaching this. And then, oh, shit, there's also this other pathway here. That's pretty cool. I've got to start teaching that. So it's more about for me right now is now that I've started to use common sense and actual textbook shit over the last few years is, you know, finding out other pathways and other things that fit into the pieces together that changes my idea about some protocols and things that we would do with people like and.

how it really affects the consequences of multiple chains, not just one or two.

CHAPTER 19

Changing Minds on HCL and Carbs

Do you remember some of the first things that you threw out in the biosec course when you guys started throwing stuff out of it? Yeah, like telling everybody they had to have hydrochloric acid, that they needed to take HCL and all that. And that came up with a discussion I had with Larry Vedado, which is another one of the guys that wrote a lot of stuff for biosec too. And I was talking to him one day and I said, why do we tell everybody that they have to have HCL? and why none of your supplements are going to work if you have HCL. And he looked at me and he goes, let me ask you something. You've read a lot of research on supplements and nutraceuticals. I go, yeah. He goes, did you ever read any single research paper that added HCL in with that supplement? I go, no. He goes, did the supplement work or the chemical work? I go, yeah. And he goes, there you go. He goes, it is highly helpful for a lot of people, but not everybody has to take it. So there's things like that. And then trying to convince people that carbs aren't the enemy, that's been a huge battle over the last seven years, eight years that I've been trying to tell people that, look, you can eat more carbs. You don't have to be low carb for life. And let's be honest. I mean, that's not a great way to live, not being able to eat chocolate or German chocolate cake anymore, pizza or cauliflower crust pizza. How fucking gross is that? I'd rather be fat. Like cauliflower rice. just give me the fucking jasmine and basmati man because that's what that's what i want you know they're coming up with some weird shit with cauliflower these days as a substitute yeah i hate that vegetable by the way i hate cauliflower if anyone can give me a good cauliflower recipe i'll take it but fuck no i like like mashed cauliflower but i'm not if i have my choice between that and potato i'm just kind of some nice fucking mashed potato shit But gluten, I've changed my ideas on gluten too. It's not as bad as people think. It's dose dependent and people need to stop blaming that for the reason why they're so fucked up. Yeah, celiacs have legitimate reason to not opt for gluten. But other than that, you're just holding up the whole line. Like we just want to get coffee. Fuck off with the muffin choice. Like you're overweight and you're fat. It's not the gluten. Yeah, exactly. Yeah looking for that magic pill All right final thing before we let you go look what is a book and or a quote that um you would recommend for the listeners uh i give you it the one i recommend everybody um but it's it's not for everybody because not everybody likes this kind of genre of things like i'm i'm into like sci-fi and fantasy shit right so then i i like terry goodkind's wizard's first rule i love the sword of truth series um it's it is uh it's set in a fantasy setting you know like sorcerers and you know swords and shit uh but the underlying tone is the philosophy so it's it's all about like objectivist philosophy of take care of yourself before you start taking care of other people don't set yourself on fire to save the world because if you set yourself on fire then you can't help anybody because you're fucking dead it's a good point yeah it's really a point it's like people that just get really sick and uh trying to like preach a certain diet and it's like you know the first animal that you have to take care of on a vegan diet is you know you you are you are the most important animal so they've got uh they've got a set of rules in it right and uh there's a there's a few of the rules that are pretty key and uh one of them is passion rules reason meaning that when you're passion overly passionate about something you throw a reason out the window so that goes hand in hand with that like if your trainer's vegan they're going to think that being a vegan is the best if they're carnivore they're going to think carnivore is the best but what's best is best for you so you've got to reason out what's actually going to be good and not allow your passion to overrule your common sense i like that nice yeah really good all right well luke you you've got obviously your company is muscle nerds people can go i would recommend first place people go follow is the instagram you guys put tons of really good content on there um i watch as much of it as i can i'm always checking for new stuff um

CHAPTER 20

Muscle Nerds Courses and Services

where else what else can people get from you i know you just told us about a new garage gym you just opened up for mentorship yep so we've got that we've got the instagram is muscle nerds underscore health um we've got muscle nerds on facebook too we just don't really do a whole lot with that yet um so we've got our education stuff we have a foundations course that we put on which is there's an online component and an in-person component where it basically goes through nutritional biochemistry. How do we take food on our plate and turn that into usable energy? How do we get it into the cell? How does the mitochondria work And then how can you use different types of dieting to drive your body in a certain specific manner So you know if we look at if we look at the research I mean it pretty clear as if calories are, are set, if your protein set, it doesn't really matter fat or carbs, if you're playing a long term, but there are situations where one style of dieting may work better than the other. So we teach you how to take metrics on stress. We teach relative energy deficiency syndrome. We teach how to, how to lay out your calories and how to lay out your foods in a way that makes sense for you at that time that you're doing and understanding that you as a human, your body's going to adapt around whatever you give it. So what you're doing right now, you may need something completely different in six months. So we teach all of that, how to, how to set that stuff up. And it's a lot about stress management because stress will alter the way you handle your nutrition. Um, we've got that. We have a pretty intensive program design course that we do where it's about 10 weeks of online content and phone calls. And then we have a seminar at the end of it and you go through it three times. So you pay once, you go through it three times and we teach you everything on, we teach assessments, manual muscle testing, we teach body reading, we teach exercise selection, we teach sets, reps, time and attention. But most importantly, we teach what all those things actually do in your body. So if I lift in a certain way, this is the adaptation. So we can use a specific adaptation to drive the body in a specific manner. Um, and then we also teach the conditioning component. So if I'm going to lift like this, I need to condition like this. And this is how it's going to alter your health biometrics. And now how do we alter your performance metrics? Um, we've got that. And then we have, like we said, we built a gym. We bought some Atlantis equipment, which in my opinion is the best equipment on the face of the planet. And we've got it in our garage. People can come out and they stay with us for a weekend or a week or however long they want to come out. We have a cinema room in the house now, so we lecture out of it. We watch videos that are tailored towards what you're looking for. Pumping Iron. What's that? I was going to say Pumping Iron. Zoe wants me to teach a physical history, a physical culture history course, so we'll be watching Pumping Iron, West Side Burst of the World. We'll be watching all that stuff, right? I just had Ashley here, and he wanted to know more about conditioning specific to things like mixed martial arts. so we watched some UFC fights and I said okay now if you'll observe here see how he's a mouth breathing you see can keep his hands up this is what going on this is how then we go into the gym and I go okay these are the protocols you would probably use of that person and now let talk about the nutrition you would use so we can custom tailor education for coaches that want to learn more about all that stuff and then we can do it for gen pop if somebody just wants to come come up to brisbane and have a holiday and they just want to train all week and we feed you and we teach you and we write your programs for the next year and all that stuff we can do that type of thing too and lastly we've got our clinic uh that jason burgess runs in uh baloomba uh the suburb in brisbane so if you've got any chronic injuries you go in there and he sorts the shit out and if it's something that we can't sort out then we've got a referral network of professionals that we can send you to to get the right treatment options for you very comprehensive if there's something yeah if there's something not in there for you then we've got we've also got bespoke bespoke training so we do the online training thing with training, nutrition, conditioning, all that stuff. And then we've got group training as well. If the bespoke training is something that's more than what you need, we have standard online training as well. That's kind of a set template with nutrition and all that stuff. Oh, cool. Nice. All right. Well, Luke, we appreciate you being on. I'm sure this won't be the last time. And absolutely, if we get a chance to do one in person, I think you'll be even more fired than this. Awesome, guys. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks, Luke. Project, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Thank you to Luke for coming on the show. Make sure you check out the Muscle Nerds Instagram page and their website as well for everything that they're doing. Stay up to date. And if you enjoyed this episode, guys, if you got value out of it, make sure you share it, take a screenshot, post it on your Insta stories, tag us, tag Luke, tag Muscle Nerds as well. And then, you know, as well, if you feel like leaving us a review on iTunes, a five-star review is incredible. It goes a long way. helps boost up in the rankings and we're just forever grateful for your ongoing support guys thank you so much remember all the sponsors of this episode true coach and whoop are in the description of this episode so go check them out and we'll speak to you next week you

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# 553 - Luke Leaman on Individualising Your Calorie Macro Breakdown

**Channel:** Mind Muscle Project
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

I wanted to take this quick opportunity to let you know that today, in 24 hours from now, when you're listening to this, there will be a competition closing and this is for GQ which is a men's magazine which you guys know all about. If you have ever bought Activated Nutrients, it is because of a man called Blair and Blair is the founder of Activated Nutrients and he is actually up for nomination for the GQ Man of the Year which is pretty special and it's because, well, obviously, he created an amazing product that a lot of us use daily, but he's actually developed a probiotic which he is using to help fight depression. And that's right, they're showing research to do with the gut. We know the gut-brain link and Blair is tapping into it with his team and they are looking at creating something which is going to help with the symptoms of depression. Guys, we know how serious this stuff is becoming, the mental health push in 2019 and it's only becoming more and more of an issue for so many different reasons, so many different factors and he's up there because of his innovations, because he is at the forefront of doing something incredible. So before you start this podcast, if you've used activated nutrients before, if mental health is important for you, I think he is a worthy nominee to be the GQ man of the year. I've put a link in the description. I would love for you guys to go to that link, sign up and vote for him. I think it's a very, very, very worthy cause. Not to say that the other guys in there haven't done cool stuff, but someone who is innovating a supplement that is going to help depression, a probiotic. He's at the forefront of this stuff. So it's incredible work. Blair, thank you so much for supporting the podcast and also we really hope you and wish you all the best in this competition. You absolutely deserve everything that you've done here. Guys, thank you if you've taken the time now to go over and switch over and vote. We appreciate it. All right, let's get into the show. This is Lachlan Rauston. This is Raf Friedman. And you're listening to the fittest podcast in Australia, The Mind Muscle Project. My Muscle Project. Welcome back to this episode with Luke Lehman of Muscle Nerds. Luke is a long-time follower, advocate, and basically, I guess kind of like he was mentored for a very long time under Charles Poliquin. But Luke kind of explains the story in this episode of how he went off to do his own thing, which is Muscle Nerds. Outside of that, this podcast is really about the in-depth look at kind of muscle science, training science, nutritional science, and kind of the myths that relate to training, nutrition, and just lifestyle stuff in general, and what really counts and what doesn't count. Because I think it's always interesting to have these evidence-based guys on the show like Brett Contreras, like Brad Schoenfeld, like Dean McKillop. And you can just hear so many different consistencies in what they say. there's no there's a no bullshit approach it's always research based it's always research plus anecdote which i like so much and to be honest when you listen to these podcasts it's kind of like it's safe you know the information that's the way i kind of treat it these days a lot of things unfiltered right so when it's coming through and you guys are listening to it now you know that the information has been filtered through us it's been filtered through guests and our team and we just make sure that everything coming through is true and it's factual and it works. And that's what we love so much about kind of the evidence-based guys. Luke is one of the best guys in the field at this stuff. So, we were super pumped to have him on. Yeah, exactly. Because it's so complicated now, you pretty much just have to find the right sources and then you trust nearly everything they say. Because actually like, you know, verifying every claim, particularly when it comes to strength and conditioning, is like impossible. Yeah, it's impossible. And I'll tell you what else is impossible is like trying to figure out your recovery without work. That's true. You can feel... Okay, so put it this way. you can feel incredible. You can wake up feeling completely energized and then you can hit halfway through the day and absolutely fall apart. Or you can go into the gym and have the worst day in the gym ever and not know why because you woke up feeling great. But with something like WIP, it does give you a more objective insight into how well recovered you are. For example, recently, I had some of the worst night's sleeps that I've ever had but my recovery scores were actually very high. Um, it was just bad sleep in terms of like, I just woke up at the wrong time. I was getting out of bed. I was hot. And what's interesting to see is sleep definitely over a long period of time will affect your recovery, but in a short term two to three day window, not having, okay, so it wasn't terrible sleep, but it was like, you know, 60, 70% sleep. You can still actually, if you dial in nutrition and food and stuff, you can actually hold off and have a good recovery score and actually perform quite well. now it's obviously not a sustainable practice but it's just good getting those sorts of insights to be able to know, okay, recovery scores are still high, sleep hasn't been good but my body is ready to perform right now I think that really does if you kind of look at sports performance say like a UFC fight for example obviously the night before they not going to sleep that well But because they so well they hydrated they ready to go their recovery score can still be quite high going into a fight like that. And so, they can still perform extremely well because the body has ways of kind of adapting to its environment to keep you primed for small windows of time. There's something fascinating I learned with the Wu. What's that? During the rugby game I was watching, my heart rate hit 167. 167 at rest watching a game on TV that's absolutely absurd that's the data you can only know when you track your heart rate 24-7 yeah it's crazy the amount of data that this thing is collecting on us right now as we speak I think is just so insightful it's only if you just trained at all, if you just have any remote interest in your recovery and improving the way you train and your health, something like this is just so much better than just your subjective feelings subjective feelings, yeah they definitely tune up, you become more fine tuned And the longer you've been training, obviously, just the longer you've existed, the more attention you're paying towards it. But ultimately, if you are doing both objective and subjective measures of where you're at, you are going to get incredible results. So, guys, if you go to whoop.com, use our code MINDMUSCLE, you're going to get 15% off your order. I'll throw a bunch of other stuff in there, maybe accessorize, get some cooler bands. If you play sport, get the armband as well. A lot of us, a lot of people have been listening to the show and buying up these whoop bands. So, I think this is like one of those products. It's like, yeah, it's perfect. Like you guys love this stuff. So, we're pumped to have it. All that stuff, if you forget guys, is in the description of this episode. And next one we have is True Coach. So, the other one I use every single day. It's how I get my programming. So, it's individualized programming. That's really the nice thing after. It's like if you program for somebody or you get programming that's individual to you, this is the best platform. I think they really don't have any competition. Yeah, they have some, but it's like, it's null. Yeah, it's like if you're like, what's the best electric car? Yeah, Tesla. Yeah, they are the Tesla. And that's how they've done it. Not for group programs, not for all different stuff, but for individual programming, it is the best one. So, if you get individual programming or your coach is giving you like Facebook or Google Sheets or some stupid stuff like that, for a very, very cheap price, you can just have like a seamless app that delivers the programming. Well, put it this way. Not a single one of our clients have ever turned around to us and said, oh, this TrueCoach thing is like kind of clunky. It doesn't really work. they've all said wow this is so so easy particularly since they got the app yeah app's been huge so we're super pumped about it truecoach.co slash mmp guys how you can pick up that offer you get a free trial and then you get a percentage off your next month so head to the description of this episode and that is where you can find all the links to everything that we just spoke about all right guys here we go with luke lehman all right my muscle project welcome back to an episode that we have been trying to set up for a while now since our usa trip but um Luke, you've been on our radar since I wanted to say the first time we interviewed Dean McKillop which is episode like, what episode is it? 40 something? 42? Yeah, just had it on a throwback but it's been what, 5 years nearly? Yeah, so you've had an interesting journey. You mentioned you were with the Poliquin Group so you're working directly under Charles which we'll get into as well but now you kind of run your own company and if people go explore what the Muscle Nerds principles are about, you'll find it's very obviously scientific evidence-based um a lot of factual stuff out of there a lot of myth debunking which obviously we love as well um so maybe give us the listeners a little bit of a background on kind of that journey with poliquin and then how you transitioned into muscle nerds um and just kind of the path you're on now okay so i mean if you go back to the start i first heard about charles poliquin when i was a kid right so like we had muscle media at the time the the magazine and the testosterone Trone.net came out. I think now it's TMag.com or something like that. So I started studying his stuff. I was way out in the country in Texas, and I'd been lifting my entire life. I started lifting when I was eight years old and then started powerlifting when I got into high school. So when I was 14. And then obviously gridiron football, and we all trained for that type of thing too. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of information back then. Like right now, everyone's spoiled for information. So if you want to know something, it's easy to find. But then there's also a lot of bullshit you got to kind of sift through too. Like you said, you got to be a bit research-based, but you also have to have experience in the gym. And those are two completely different worlds. There's very few people that put both of those together, which is what we try to do, right? So I started studying Charles of Stuff, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all of these old school guys. And for whatever reason, Charles of Stuff really resonated with me. and I started using his systems and it worked really well and I got brutally strong for powerlifting in high school and also in college and I said, okay, one day I have to go meet this guy, so I saved and saved and saved. In 2007 I went and I did my first PICP level one and my first bioseg sat on that and I was hooked Like the culture that they had at the time was amazing The camaraderie the kind of brother sisterhood type stuff And it was like I like these are my people Like I've grown up my entire life, not having access to people like this that are like me. Because as we know, like back then, like what we do now is pretty common. Back then it was super taboo. Like people didn't work out like they do now. Bodybuilding was really kind of a subculture underground thing. And now it's kind of become a popular thing. A lot of women didn't lift back then. It was nuts. It was kind of the transfer into what we have currently now. And so after I met him and Andre Benoit and some of the other guys, I decided I want to work for these guys at some point. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to work for these guys. And so I put in the hard yards. I was training people, training myself, studying, understanding all of their systems, nutrition, and all that. And then eventually, after a few years, I started working for them as an assistant instructor in North America. So they would call me. I would travel out. I would help teach some of the stuff, talk to students and help instruct and things like that. And then in 2013, Charles left the company and they brought me in to kind of take over his position teaching bio-sig and as a head lecturer for the PICP program. That went on for a couple of years as I kept getting more educated and kept getting mentored by other people like James LaBelle. I started seeing some things that I didn't like, like some of the stuff we're teaching. I'm like, this isn't really actually factually correct. I don't really agree with this stuff and that created a bit of strife between myself and some of the people in the company And so eventually actually tomorrow september 11th four years ago. I Was let go and I left and at this time um, my my Fiance which we're getting married in february So after four years and we were she had she had quit both of her jobs and sold her car to fly over to america to be with me. And so now I didn't have a job. She didn't have a job. We're like, Oh, what the fuck are we going to do? We didn't have a game plan. It's like, well, well, I don't have to teach anymore. So we've got a little bit of money. I guess we can just go back to New Zealand and go back to Australia. And I can hang out there for both of those places for a few months. And when I, when I announced that I was leaving Pauliken group, we were inundated with all of these people that wanted to work with us, but they didn't want to work with us if we were working with Pauliken group. So we had a guy, a friend of mine in Kuwait, he texted me, he goes, hey, would you like to come teach your kind of your theories and your things around this in Kuwait? And I went, okay, cool. So we did a small seminar in Dubai, didn't want to Kuwait and that paid for us to get, you know, home to New Zealand. We hung out there with Zoe's family for a few months. Another guy called me, said, you want to put on a seminar? I said, yeah. So then we just started putting on seminars and I I started putting together all the content and all the information that I had amassed over 20 years. I've been training since I was 8. I'm 41 now, so it's 30 years of under-the-bar experience, competition experience, plus now getting into the actual research-based type of stuff, right? Actually pulling out textbooks and learning from people like Brian Walsh, Mike T. Nelson, learning biochemistry and cell physiology, and then saying, okay, if I go in the gym and I do this, I know this is what's going to happen, but I want to know why. And I've always been a why guy. Why, if I do five sets of five, why does that differ from doing, say, three sets of 15? So I started unraveling all this, and then I started falling in love with the biochemistry and really with the sports nutrition aspect of it. And I just went full steam into that. So over the last four years, just teaching myself as much about biochem as I can. And now I've kind of done things backwards. I've taught myself a lot of the stuff I need to know, and now I'm going back to school so i'm now getting a graduate diploma in sports nutrition and then going on to a master's of research nutrition so whereas the difference between what i do and what most people do is most people go to college and we learn all this theory but they've never really trained so they go out of college and they have no idea how to apply what they've learned in college well i went and did the bro science thing and i lifted weights and powerlifting and all that and then I now I filled in the blanks with the actual the actual formal education yeah I think that's exactly what happened to me with when I went to university is that I started I opened a gym while I was two years into my degree and then after being two years into business it became impossible to finish a degree because now I knew exactly what I wanted to do and it no longer what I was doing there applied whereas you've done it exactly the opposite way right you've done all the hard yards you've done all the experience and now you're applying the theory to your previous experience which is a great way to do it because there's context to everything you read um and yeah eventually well then you'll know i guess whatever you're reading if it has context for whatever you want to do next which is i guess why you can be so passionate about something studying later in life um i had a follow question though so um now you know we just went before i before i asked this question i want to say you know i have immense respect for charles and what he did for the industry And I think he had as much of an impact as something like CrossFit in terms of the information he was putting out there So many of his methods like tempo training and stuff, he popularized so many different things. He got girls doing pull-ups and stuff, immense amount of stuff. That being said, he got kicked out of his own company for people who didn't realize. and this isn't about throwing Charles under the bus but I think the point I want to make here or what I think maybe you can shine some light on Luke is that someone like how does you said eventually the stuff they started teaching wasn't factual like and that's something that we started to notice later in Charles Charles's career he started saying some stuff that just started to become outrageous like don't touch receipts because you'll get the ink on you and the ink will cause cancer and stuff like that some outrageous stuff what is it that you see like happens to some of these people that become these massive thought leaders. And then at the start, they're so good. But then eventually, it just becomes this almost guru status. And the information they start giving out is just like so far off because we saw it with Greg Glassman in CrossFit. Some of the stuff he's giving out now is just outrageous. What do you think happened in Charles' situation? You know, it's a trap that a lot of people get into. And I will forever be grateful for the relationship I had with Charles. And our relationship was not good at the end because there was all kinds of strife going on between Pollock and group and him and, you know, uh, myself as to find results, but the other guys got kind of caught in the middle of all that, um, whether we wanted to or not. And so, but I mean, without Charles, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing and I would never have fallen in love with strength and conditioning. I definitely would not have fallen in love with sports nutrition and supplementation and the science behind all that. But you know, the trap I see people get into is exactly what happened on Instagram right now. Like everybody, he was, there's two people I would say that are the best in the world at programming for long-term like Olympic level athletics. And it's Stefan Kozolt and it's Charles Pollock. Like hands down for being able to find systems or other people's types of ways they're doing it. Girona stuff, Reg Park stuff, physical culture. Charles was a massive fan of physical culture, which I am too. And that's something we're losing these days. so he was able to take all these different systems say well how do we periodize them together and make them make sense and put them into uh into a usable system for people right that makes sense he was brilliant at that but the problem is with a lot of people is they want to find what's the new edgy woo-woo shit and it kind of got too much into that where you you start learning from from functional medicine type people right and then they start losing the force for the trees and they start saying, well, the reason you're fat is because the BPA on the receipts that you're holding. No, the reason you're fat is because you're fucking overeating. I mean, that's, you're stressed out and you're overeating and you're probably not moving enough. I mean, that's what it all boils down to. But when people are overweight and they're desperate, they don't want to hear shit like that. They want to hear what is the weird thing, because I don't want to think that it's my fault that I can't stop eating and that I can't control my hunger signals. And for a lot of people, those hunger signals can be so powerful that they they simply can't, but it all boils down to simple basic physiology. But some people want answers and they want it to be something that it's not them. Right. And so there's a lot of people that cater to that. They're like, well, it's probably because you have estrogen dominance or you have a high cortisol. You have this, well, let's find some woo stuff that we can put in our system and trademark that I can then sell. And you see it all over Instagram. Now, especially all these people that want to get into the education side of the business that I'm on, it's like in my day, when I got into it, you were selected to come work and become part of an education company. Now, because of the internet, anybody can start an education company and anyone can make themselves look like an expert, right? All you have to do is watch a YouTube video and then make your own YouTube video. And now you're an instant expert, but what you're doing, it's like, it's like stolen valor. It's like a guy that dresses up like a Marine and puts all of these like a purple heart and all these but they actually were never in the Marines. Like, so you get a lot of people who are teaching things and they don't actually have a portfolio. They don't have a track record and they don't actually understand what they're talking about. Right. I know I'm digressing away from Charles's thing, but there was a thing where, you know, people can get caught in dogmatic beliefs about how they think things work. So if low carb works for me, it has to work for everybody. If Rhonda stuff works for me, it has to work for everybody. So you get stuck into that and you start giving that their money and you start preaching and then it becomes almost like cultish, like a religion. Yeah. So you felt like it just became too good for business to keep going down these side avenues that didn't really have much substance. Well, there was some merit to a lot of the stuff, but there was also the bad that you had to take with that. And, you know, Polycom Group is a supplement company. So in order to sell supplements, you have to come up with ways of selling supplements.

the plate they have a rough idea of how many calories on the plate how much protein how much fat how much carb but man that's a skill that has to be built over time it's the same thing like if you get a client in who can bench press 80 kilos you using intuitive eating with that is like putting 200 kilos in the bar and expecting the bench press that it's not going to work they have to build the skill to understand how it works yeah well it's such a strange starting point because they're basically what they've been doing beforehand which hasn't been working has been intuitive eating that's been doing what they do so it's so strange to be like okay whatever you've been doing more of that like just don't listen to any principles well like it started with the with the women right and they started it was like the anti-diet culture that women were subjected to and another group of women were like okay you know you've been told that you know you need to restrict your calories and you need to be on this diet and you're skinny and you hate yourself and like we're the anti of that but they went too far the other way and so they're just a different evil now now one's like you know creating all these different problems uh but it hasn't helped the the other group at all so it's always the gray area the middle ground that we talked about where people are going to find the answers it's all it's all a pendulum it's either going to swing extreme one way or extreme the other so like um in the in the 60s and 70s the 50s 60s 70s it was kind of like keto high fat low carb type stuff then they said okay that's killing everybody okay cool. So in the late seventies and eighties and part of the nineties, it was all low fat, high carb. Well now carbs killing everybody. So now we've swung the other way. Everybody's so totally keto. It's like, for fuck's sake, can this pendulum just, can we just find some middle ground in here and just look at what is actually really important and nail that. But the problem is again, that's not marketable. So you have people out there, you have, you have all of the top research guys, you got Alan Aragon, you have Lane Norton, you have all these guys saying, look, if you get your calories correct get your protein correct it doesn't really fucking matter carbs and protein i mean carbs and fat as long as it fits in you're going to be okay if you're playing the long game and that's true but that's not sexy to people they're like they they want to belong to a group so i'm either going to be a keto person or a paleo person or a vegan person or a carnivore person it's like there's elements of all your guys dieting that works really well and there's some real fucked up to toot about some of the stuff you guys are doing why don't you look at all those diets and say, hey, I bet if we combine all this stuff and use some common sense that we could probably find a good way of eating, which we already know how that is, but no one wants to buy it. No one wants to buy health. They want to buy religion, nutritional religion or training religion or whatever the hell you do or supplementary religion. Nobody wants to just understand that, dude, if you just be really fucking consistent and track your shit over time, you'll probably get where you want to go. And if you don't, then it's probably a medical issue or nutrient deficiency that's out of scope of practice for your trainer to even diagnose for you. And you need real help from a qualified doctor that understands nutrition as well or a dietician. But that's the hard thing. What we're selling at Muscle Nerds, it's not a sexy thing to say, hey, we're going to teach you basic fundamental things that you guys should already fucking know before you try to get in all the complex shit. and and from the from the training perspective as well obviously i feel like the nutrition stuff is yeah you get you definitely get the uh the religious camps part of it was just because you know a lot of people they don't so many people are depressed and lonely these days i think it's like wasn't it read somewhere the average american over 24 like it's like 50 percent of them say that they're alone like they don't have a friend or a partner which is crazy right so i guess when people find something like this that they don't can be their friend yeah well it's just like the keto camp becomes their new religion like you said right they find all these people and they all agree on something they all go hard in this area and yes maybe for a lot of people that weren't doing anything it is a better change maybe they're cutting out a lot of shit in their diet and so that they are getting some health initial health results um but the long game it just it just makes everything worse but um on the training side of things it's been a lot of like we've gone through a lot we've gone through bodybuilding powerlifting olympic lifting crossfit all this different stuff and then we kind of come out the other side and you know we're not we started in a camp we started in the crossfit camp especially when we started this podcast and our gyms and now we're kind of moving away but you still see a lot of people they hang on to it they want to they want to be a part of this religion but it's not serving them it's not the best for them their knees still suck their shoulders still suck their backs blown out but they love it for you from the muscle nerd side what what is it about training that you guys preach uh we preach you know you should do the training that you enjoy doing i mean and that you don't have to do anything if you don't want to if look if you if you like to power lift knock yourself out but don't tell everybody that's the only way to do it if you're a power lifter or bodybuilder and you hashtag fuck cardio and you tell people that cool that fine and now you can see all these guys having strokes and they on dialysis they having all these issues because they not taking care of the health aspect of things right do you need this stuff to get lean you don need you don need a fucking squat to get lean you don't need to lift weights to get lean i haven't lifted weights in the last fucking nine months i've lost 14 kilos so and i went in we just bought a bunch of equipment put it at the house and i was like i wonder if i'm still as strong as i was when i started dieting i was benching 125 i I went in the gym. I benched 120. I haven't fucking bench pressed in nine or 10 months. It's been all cardio. It's been aerobic conditioning. It's been my diet. It's been jiu-jitsu. That's all I've done because after lifting weights for 30 years, I didn't want to lift weights anymore. I was like, I can't fucking do another squat or another pull-up. I need something else. I found something I enjoyed. I enjoyed choking motherfuckers out. I did that. right now that now that i bought this atlantis equipment now it's like okay i can go in my gym in my underwear and i can go do pull-ups on it so i just started training like two weeks ago and now i'm enjoying it again right so i'm going to start doing a little bit more that but people need to just find something that they fucking enjoy and stop listening to people that say you have to do something right um you have to squat it's the king of lower body exercises why do you have to squat it's a primal movement it's a primal movement to squat down and take a shit it's not a primal movement to squat down with 100 kilos on your back, right? You think that's natural, you're fucking retarded. Something's wrong with you, right? If you think that's the case, then install a squat rack on your toilet. And every time you take a shit, squat down with 100 kilos on your back. Stop telling people these are normal natural movements and they have to do it if they really want to be strong and healthy, right? Because if you look at things like the squat, there is only one sport on earth where the squat is a specific physical preparation exercise and that's powerlifting. Okay. For all other sports, it's a very good tool to develop lower body strength to transition into your sport. Right. So, um, that's the thing, like our kind of thing is if you know enough about the body, you realize there's many roads to roam and you need to pick the training that you're going to get enjoyment out of because you're more likely to actually do it multiple times a week. You know, when I was in my twenties, I, again, I came from the camp where if you couldn't fix it with squats and fish oil, you're probably going to die. and I made everybody had to squat, you know, so God would roll in in a wheelchair and, you know, can't, can't, can't move his legs from the leg down. I'd be like, that's no excuse getting the squat. Right. I realized now, I realized now, like I was a real asshole. Like I love to squat. Not everybody likes that. And not everybody has the orthopedic profile to do it correctly. So there's no inherent reason to do that. If you can't squat, great. You got the hack squat, you got the leg pressure, you got split squats, you got step ups, you know, you got lunges, you got fucking booty blaster hip extension shit. You got a reverse hyper, you got back extension, you got all sorts of other things you can use. If you hate a movement or hate an exercise or hate a style, then don't fucking do it. Right. Do something you're going to love and you're going to be consistent at. And I think that's probably the best advice for most people. You know, I think that obviously I'm a, I'm a meathead at heart. I started lifting weights when I was eight. Everyone should probably lift, but everyone should also take care of the cardiovascular respiratory system and take care of the things that give them the energy to lift harder, faster, and better, which is take care of your mitochondria, get your stress down, take care of your lungs and your heart and your vascular system. And then yes, also resistance training. So you keep high quality of muscle and then understand that you should probably, you should probably lift in ranges that work every muscle fiber, meaning that yes, yes, you do still need to lift weights for your type one fibers. Yes, you need to lift for the type two and yes, you need to lift for the type two X, But then you have to keep that in context too, because we have to say if Mary Muffintop comes in, does she need to do single one rep max in the squat? Probably not. So we've got to say, okay, what's our range of where we can lift where you still get strong enough to stimulate those fibers, but not to a point where it becomes risky and dangerous with somebody who can't chew gum and walk at the same time. Right. So, I mean, I can go on for hours and bitch about this, but it's just because I've, like I said, I've come from the bro side first and I've, I've preached the dumb shit and the shit that doesn't make sense. And now that I've gotten, you know, more research based and textbook based, I realized like, man, like some of the stuff I used to have people doing was completely unnecessary. and there's no wonder I had a lot of client turnover, you know, because I was making them do things that they did not want to do and it was completely unnecessary to make them do that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of it as well, it's like people, when they start their journey in health and fitness at this point, it's almost like, okay, anything works as long as whoever's teaching it to them or whatever keeps them safe. So obviously like the first thing is the injury right Like you never want to go do something that just going to fuck you up And and then you like all right all movement is bad and now they can walk So like considering that whatever they do they ease into it and they do it correctly i think is really good i think for a lot of people it just takes a while for them to build up to the point where they ready to like lift weights i know that's why like f45 orange theory barry's boot camp xyz whatever these group fitness gyms are they they do such a good job of just lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible. My only issue with it is that if someone is going to, I think they're just, their expectations are a little off as to what results they might get. And that is just because of the marketing, right? That's just because if you look at the marketing for these gyms, the guys that are in that marketing, I know for a fucking fact that guy benches. I know for a fact he does strict press and back squat and deadlifts and he does hill sprints and stuff. He's jacked, you know? You look at him and the trainer there is like, man, we just hit a crazy leg day. and this guy is jacked and i'm like there are no weights in your gym like i'm looking then there's treadmills and tiny dumbbells like i know for a fact you did not get quads like that on the treadmill yeah yeah it's just it's just one of those things where the expectation is wrong that's and that's my only issue with it is obviously they're just selling something which just isn't reality and look enough people go through these gyms every now and then you'll get some guy with amazing genetics that when he does battle ropes his biceps grow you know or his delts start to pop it's just kind of how it goes. Or it might be a guy that maybe he's 50 now, but he was an all-star athlete in high school and university, and that muscle was already built, and then he touches something, boom, he blows up. It's me. I've lifted for so long that the minute I lift weights, I'll put on seven kilos in a week just going in and doing a few workouts and eating a little bit more because I built that muscle early on, so it's just sitting there dormant waiting to be used, and the minute I use it, it responds, right? But, you know, so there's a lot of different factors that can be in it. And, you know, with those types of places, they're catering to people that, you know, they're intimidated by going to a big gym. They're intimidated by going to a high-performance facility where you probably got some guys walking around with chalk and grinding and throwing dumbbells and just acting a fool. That's not very marketable. That's why Planet Fitness does so well in the United States, you know, and people talk shit about Planet Fitness. I had a Planet Fitness membership. Why? Because I was in contest prep and there was one two minutes from my house. And it was easy for me to go there and knock out a Smith machine bodybuilding workout or get on the treadmill and do my cardio or whatever. And I loved it because, A, I was the most jet motherfucker in the gym. The gorilla has arrived. And, B, I didn't have to deal with any douchebags. All the equipment was always immaculate. It was always well-maintained. It was all – there was – the dumbbells were always in the right spot, you know. So there was a real high benefit to that. But as I've gotten older, I've decided not to be such a dick about what other people want to do and about facilities. And we do some stuff with F45 as far as our clinic in Bloomington treating people and things like that. But do I agree with everything they do? Absolutely not. But you know what they do well is they create a community and they get people in the door. like people they and they want to come and they want to to move and that's what people really need to do is move more but you know in my experience in the industry the people who who demonize certain things it's always because they're not good at those things so if you say like uh there's a lot i i'm certified in animal flow and i love animal flow it's not for everybody i like it you know but you'll get like these power lifters who are like animal flow so stupid crawling around the ground they don't like it because the reason they don't like it is because if they get on the ground on their back they can't get up they're like a fucking turtle and they can't they can't reach around and wipe their ass they have to go between their legs so they they demonize because they know they can't do it and you know once you get over your ego and realize that that shit's pretty cool man being able to do handstands and be able to do like move through different planes of movement that's probably what people need the most combined with a little bit of solid strength training and say we say okay everything we have is a tool we just use the right tool for the right job yeah i mean the more i just restrict the amount of movements that i'm doing in my training and the less range of motions that i load and pass through the worse i feel like yeah i can still look good you know i can still have the muscle mass and be lean and stuff but you just don't feel as good like your hips your hips hurt more your back hurts more your shoulders are tighter like everything just becomes a little bit just worse like you hang on the bar i used to hang like stretch free but now i get like a real tearing sensation through my pecs i'm like this is just because like you're just so limited in your training and i just think so many people like you said are scared they just avoid it because you know a big part of it is that people don't want to embarrass themselves they're also in the gym and they're like i don't want to try this new thing that i could be bad at because i'm such a badass when i squat and everyone stares at me and i feel good but now if i have to drop down and you know go into dog and stretch out my hamstrings and I look like I A pool of sweat underneath Yeah The ego stops them People don't want to get on a machine they don't know how to use, right? They're like, oh, what do I do? What if I do it wrong? People will... That's why they stand near it for ages, just looking at people use it until they're 100% confident how to use it correctly. Like the skier. People don't know how to use the skier, so they just leave it. It's a really effective tool, but it's the same principle across all things that people don't want to try. they don't want to embarrass themselves so they stick to what they're good at and as a result that's their detriment so the best thing we can do as trainers as coaches as mentors to these people is like make it as like don't no judgment on on any of the stuff just make it a friendly welcoming environment so that everyone feels like they can try and fail and learn because you know a lot of people are really intimidated coming into the gym it's so easy to forget that day one they're like okay, it's okay to fail here because it's normal and I can get better. A hundred percent. And you know, it's just, it's like you said, it's that ego thing. It's that ego. And you know, you get people who they struggle just to get to the gym because they're so intimidated. And then you're laughing at them because they don't know how to use the machine or you're laughing because they're doing some weird rotational movement. And you know, you look at these guys that are there, they live in the sagittal plane and when they have to get out of that plane, they're completely screwed. Right. So, you know, we need to think about, you know, sagittal plane movements. Great. We need that. If you want to get strong, you're going to need that stuff, but that's not the only plane there is. And you should probably, as a human that, that, that craves movement, you should be learning how to move in all the different planes. You've got to be able to flex and rotate and get up and down off the ground. And you know, that type of thing. And that's when you show people doing those types of movements, the hardcore lifters start laughing at them and they're like, well, that's stupid. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, look how internally rotated and how abducted your shoulders are. And like you're, you're hyperflexed in your, uh, in your elbow flexors because your shoulders so tight that you can't straighten your arms and you can't reach overhead to change a light bulb. It's like, like I would, I would rather be strong enough and also be able to move enough and be conditioned enough and, and feel awesome, you know, and prioritize stuff that's really going to matter like sleep and digestion. And, you know, there's all these other things that, that, that go into, I hate the word holistic, but go into a holistic kind of program that's above and beyond the squat bench deadlift and overhead press. Right. Um, but you know, when you're younger, that's all you care about really is looking bad-ass and lifting lots of weight and doing big high jumps on a fricking 30, 36, 40 something inch box or whatever, you know, and some people eventually grow out of that. and some people won't let it go because that's their identity and they're scared to let go of their identity and grow as a person you know if and that was me man in when I was 24 25 I was 100 and it was 123 kilos oh I had abs like not a shredded but I you know I was it so big I'd walk in somewhere people would stop and look at me and at that time that was my identity I was I I started lifting weights because I got bullied. So I thought, well, if I get as big as possible, no one will fuck with me. It's not actually true. If you do that, people will fuck with you more. When you leave high school and alcohol is involved, the smallest dude will be the drunkest dude. He's the one that's going to start a fight with you, right? So I put on this gorilla suit to kind of try to keep the world away from me. And then you start getting attention, and you're like, hey, this is kind of pretty cool. you know? Um, but, and then you just get completely, absolutely dysfunctional. And it wasn't until my mid thirties where I was like, I don't have to be that guy anymore. I would actually probably rather feel amazing. So I'm going to go ahead and get rid of all this excessive weight that I don't need. I'm going to get my blood pressure down. I'm going to get my heart rate down. I'm going to prioritize sleep and trying to move better again. And, and I just never looked back, man. And I really don't want to like, sometimes I crave, like I'd love to get under a 320 pound squat or 300 kilo squat. And I'd love to squat that again. I'd love to deadlift 335 again, you know, but it's just not a priority to me anymore. I don't justify my self-worth by being, by people going, Ooh, look how, look how strong you are. I'd rather people look at your merits and your character and other things and say, wow, this guy moves really well. He's got a really nice physique. He's conditioned. He's nice. He's, you know, he's helpful and things. those those are the things as I've aged it's become more important to me it's like helping other people being helpful you know serving others and then taking care of my health so I get another for hopefully another 40 50 years on this planet of feeling amazing hmm I think what you just touched on there so important and I think it's such a hard thing to realize like even you know we're still like in our late 20s now and it's still one of those things where it's like you're trying to prove it to

yourself and prove it to your peers that you know you're still a badass you know you don't want to be like okay i've reached the peak you know you still want to get as big and as jacked and as strong as possible but um yeah sometimes the value switches and it's just like okay it's just not that important to me anymore so how how long did it take you when you made that decision to as you started pulling the weight off i mean your whole life you'd been working to get as big and as gorilla as possible like was it a hard shift like did you just wake up one day and as it started to come off did you think fuck this i'm gonna put it back on or how was that back and forth you know it was yeah it's funny it's it's one of those things where you just find like it's hard to do like normal shit and you just feel awful and i i knew something was i knew something was a miss when i when i rotated around to to put a couple of milliliters of testosterone in my butt cheek and i realized i can't actually write so i had to start jabbing in my thigh and i was like this is stupid like i can't even turn around and look at my blue like what the fuck is wrong with me right and then you know it's just stuff it's shit like that right just normal normal stuff and then like one of the one of the things that i was like something's definitely wrong i was in i was in chicago i was at my buddy zach's uh facility all strength training in chicago and i was i was on the bench press and i had 365 pounds in the bar and i was doing like five sets of five and and i I was like, okay, he doesn't have a lot of – it's a really toned-down group training thing for general population. So they've got some racks. There's not a lot of equipment there. It's a very efficient space to train him. And I was like, I'll do some push-ups. Let me do a few push-ups and see because I haven't done push-ups in years. I couldn't fucking do 10 push-ups. And I told Zoe, I said, I would rather load that bar with 365 pounds and rep that out then they get on the ground with no weight and do a push-up because the push-up is too hard. And at that point, I realized something wasn't right. So then I was like, you know what, I'm tired of this. And, you know, that's one of the things as you get older, it's going to be harder to do is things. There's things that are very trainable, like hypertrophy and strength is pretty trainable as you age, right? You can maintain a lot of that. But things like reaction time, speed and stability and power, those types of things start to diminish. I started thinking, okay, for longevity, I'm halfway through my life about, so the next half of my life, I'm going to work on where I'm going to be in 40 years. I don't want to end up like my grandparents and not be able to move and be mobile because theirs is from underuse, and mine's going to be from overuse of the wrong things. And so I started thinking ahead. So what we talked about earlier, like, why am I thinking about the next six weeks? I need to be thinking about the next 40 years that I've got left on earth, hopefully. you know it so it wasn't that it wasn't that hard really and and my wife made me realize that she's gonna love me no matter if i'm fat or if i'm lean or if i'm gigantic and strong if she doesn't give a shit so why the fuck do i care about what anybody else thinks because she's the only one that i give a fuck about so um yeah so uh where was i going with that there was something else i was gonna say but now i forgot i'm gonna get i think i think just when you when you run or you play that card for a while and you kind of maybe when you start you're not there right so you're at the beginning of the journey and our expectations of what life or whatever you however you'll feel at the end of it is always different to the reality and so you're like okay when i'm gorilla jacked and i can do 150 kilo bench press for 10 reps i'll just squish small people in my hands yeah i'm gonna get this is how i'm gonna feel this is the attention i'm gonna get this is how my life's gonna be and yeah maybe you get some of those things or whatever but then you realize this actually isn't that good anyway. Like it was more just covering up an initial insecurity. But getting there is not that good. It's like the same, you always hear billionaires or people that have crazy success get rich and they realize, okay, well, I'm still not happy. My relationship still suck. I'm still out of shape because a lot of these things in life can't be fixed with a dollar bill. And the same thing is when you get there and you get jacked and you put on all this muscle, it's like, oh, I actually didn't want attention from that person. I didn't give a shit about that person. I don't actually feel better or feel good. And I think that's when people start to make the switch is when they get to their goal. And they're like, wow, this is nothing to like what I expected. What do I really want? Yeah, I want X, Y, and Z. They move towards those. Well, part of the, I think part of the problem is people are too busy working out. They're not working in and they need to start working in a little bit more and saying, okay, you know, it's an addiction, right? It's the same thing as a drug addiction, alcohol addiction, an anorexia. You know, you got guys that got bigorexia. And they think, well, I'm going to get bigger and stronger, and it's going to make me feel better about myself. And then they get there, and they realize, man, this is a real pain in the ass to maintain. My joints hurt. I'm bloated all the time. My fucking food bill is like $1,000 a week. This is ridiculous. And you get to the point where I actually not happy anymore And then you say well I go buy myself something cool I go buy a new TV or I buy a new house I buy a new car I buy a yacht about whatever And then you you sitting in that new car You're scared to park it anywhere because you don't want somebody to dig it or scratch it. And then that becomes a pain in the ass, you know? So people, people, but I think we are trained, you know, we're trained to think that something new and shiny is going to make ourselves feel a little bit better. And so we're always chasing those reward things. And what's the newest, greatest thing I can take that's going to make me feel better about myself? And I heard Joe Rogan say this on a video the other day is that we're too busy chasing comfort because we think that that's going to make us feel better. What we need to be doing is chasing challenges and goals and trying to put ourselves in a position of being uncomfortable and working our way out of it and that's really what what we're what we're instinctively tuned to do is to overcome overcome obstacles but people don't want to overcome obstacles anymore they want us to be very comfortable right we need challenge to grow yeah i guess that's why you took on such a difficult field of study and in such a you know a point in life where people say oh you're too old to learn yeah i mean shit man how many people go back to school 40 years of age and you know more people should, right? But that to me, that's my drug. That's my addiction now. Like sit, sitting and watching lectures and reading textbooks and, and, and then trying to create new things. Like people always say there's nothing left to create in the industry. That's bullshit. There's nothing left to create. If you don't understand the body enough to create something like I had a, I had a guy that flew in. He's, he's finishing his osteopath school and he does, he comes to our house and he stays with us for two or three days every few weeks and we do a mentorship thing and we came up with a ton of new treatment protocols and a lot of new ideas about things that we were finding just some of it was by accident some of it was by thinking about what's connected to what maybe if we do this it changes this and then we try it and we're like oh that's crazy i've never seen that before and you know there's still plenty of room to grow and create things if you get the foundational knowledge enough to be able to create something yeah absolutely yeah i need those principles I don't want to forget this before we jump into our final questions, but with the vegan diet obviously on the rise at the moment, a lot of it's propagated by Netflix putting out so many different documentaries. there's obviously an underlying agenda i feel like there's a big push for potentially certain vegetables or plant proteins which will become patent or they already are which they can monetize and sell better than than meat because you obviously can't really patent a cow or a pig or anything like that so what do you see is like the main issues with the vegan diet and what do say is good about it as well well i mean we've got again go back to my 20s i would have been like oh that's stupid blah blah blah blah but over time i've changed a lot of my ideas i think the vegan diet's great um i think it's better if you add a little bit of meat to it but if that's not your option that's how we tell people to eat like a vegan a good vegan because there's good vegans there's bad vegans eat like a good vegan and then garnish it with meat whereas in my 20s it was like eat like a carnivore and garnish it with veggies. I think that we really should be eating more of a plant-based diet. But for me, plant-based doesn't mean meat-free. It means eating more plants, a lot more plants, and then eating enough protein, right? And people probably do over-consume protein. And not Gen Pop, but trainers tend to over-consume protein, right? And that's been a real mind-blower for me because I've done some vegan experiments with myself. Let me do, and I even took it extreme i did ketogenic vegan just to see what what would happen right and i didn't die and i didn't get weak and i didn't lose all my muscles so you know it's the same thing with training you should find the eating style that resonates with you but don't pass that off as as it's healthier than something else right because it's clearly not um but um i just totally lost my train of thought but but is it more isn't it more inconvenient for average people though is it like takes more preparation so if they can't drink water and eat enough you know eat enough protein to begin with surely limiting your protein options makes it more difficult for gen pop let's make it more difficult and like to be able to be a good vegan it takes a lot of work there's some efficiencies you have to work out you know there's milk combining and things like that but like we have a vegan on our staff marx o'farrell and she did it for our program design class she She does a small lecture on veganism, like how to work with vegans, because that's something that if you're not a vegan, you really don't understand what they're going through. And one of the things she said that was really powerful to me is you not gonna be able to change someone belief system right So and vegans have they vegan because of any number of reasons right Maybe it because in in her case she loves animals and wants to end animal suffering. You're not going to change that belief system. So you have to learn how to work with them and how to make that a healthier option. Or if you're not comfortable with that, you refer out, right? Um, if you're doing it because you think it's the healthiest diet, you're not right, right? The healthiest diet is a balanced diet. And there's certain things that we're going to get out of animal protein, you simply can't get out of eating plant proteins, especially some of these new fake plant proteins, right? You know, but by the same token, like, these guys doing the carnivore diet, I think they're going to find out that's going to be disastrous eventually, because you still need some plants, like you still probably need to get some fiber and phytonutrients and things like that. So it's like, it's like the saying goes, you know, there's three sides to every story. There's your side, my side, and somewhere in the middle lies the truth. So we don't want to over consume any one thing. We don't want to under consume something. We want to eat everything in a balanced diet. But if, if, if veganism is something that, uh, resonates with you, uh, resonates with your soul and that's the way your belief system set up, then that's fine. You just got to learn how to do it correctly, but don't push it on someone else. Like this is like religion. If you're a Christian, don't push that on me, right? If you're a Buddhist, don't push that on me. If you're Muslim, don't push that on me. Like I'm, I'm agnostic, so I don't know what to fucking believe so the last thing i want somebody to do is pushing their agenda on me so if you're gonna if you're going to subscribe to some belief system for the way you should be eating i'm great i i love that don't fucking push it on me yeah that's a good point and a lot of the um what's got really popular as well recently i think with the vegan diets is the meat substitutes uh do you find that that stuff is terrible like if you're going to use it i'm okay like if you want to use a meat substitute like what's already out there like you know a black bean patty or corn patty or something. Okay, knock yourself out. But this new fake shit they're coming out with, like the Beyond Burger and all this other stuff, when you actually look at the ingredients, man, it's a clusterfuck of stuff. And it's expensive. It's more expensive than beef, and it's less nutritious, right? And there's really no reason to do any of that stuff now because they have plenty of really good vegan protein powders. Like I use a protein powder by Thorne that's vegan, some of their medical food shakes it's nice it's well balanced um you can a couple of those and you can be halfway to your protein goal right there and then you can easily fill the rest up with beans and quinoa and whatever else yeah it's interesting i will um be experimenting with it next week yeah i'll tell you more about later but um no that's been that's been some good stuff so um look we uh did we send luke questions fantastic all right look you are prepared for these questions so first question is um if you had an opportunity to sit down and interview anyone that is alive today who would you choose and why no i had i had to think long and hard about this right and and who i would actually want to sit down with um i think i'd want to sit down with elon musk that would be awesome i'd love to sit down with him and just play video games like i think that'd be cool right like uh i'm not i'm not uh i'm not a big weed guy but uh I'd smoke a blunt with him. I'd eat some mushrooms or acid with him. I think that would be like the best night ever. That and, you know, I'd love to talk to him about space and where SpaceX is going and what their plans are and how they're going to actually get to Mars and where he sees like the next 40 or 50 years of space exploration going. And I'd also like to ask him about Neuralink. I'd like to ask him if I could get on the list and be one of the first people to get Neuralink installed in the mind. into my brain so that'd be freaking cool it's either going to be one of those conversations or one of those nights with him where you come out of it really optimistic about the future or really really pessimistic about the existence and what's going to happen i think it'd be mind-blowing man just like listening him on joe rogan podcast was great i've listened to that a few times and then sometimes like watching videos of him when he's when he's on stage with other people and some of the faces he makes when they say weird dumb shit i think i think the guy's brilliant man Yeah. It's a once-in-a-lifetime sort of person, especially to live through his era. He basically has revolutionized the auto industry. It's not going to be long now until they're self-driving and electric. It's just crazy to live through this time. I guess there's always crazy inventors, right? It's always like Isaac Newton and Einstein, all these different people. Everyone would have lived through their time and be like, man, it's crazy that he did this and he changed this and did so much for us and like this is just our version it's just the 2019 version of you know the newtons and the einsteins yeah and like to talk to somebody who everyone said you can't do this or can't do that and he said here hold my beer right just say fuck it i'm gonna do it anyways and yeah right i i a i a an extremely odd person and so i like hanging out with fantastically weird people and he is just you can you can get weirder than that guy Yeah it about as weird as I come The best bit would be if you had the meeting with him and then everyone was like, oh, what'd you ask him? Like, oh, we just played video games. Didn't really get to any of the questions. What's your high score on Galaga? Let's go. Nice. Okay, so second question is, what is something that you do or you try and do every single day that you feel like contributes a lot to the success of your day? Oh, man. I was talking to Zoe about this because I'm a horribly unstructured person. I'm not a scheduled person where she is. And so I think probably the only thing that I do every day that I have to do is I have to learn something new. I have to study something. And I have to at least – I got to masturbate, crank one out at least once. Clear the mind. And play with my dogs. As long as I'm home, right? But I can still masturbate and study when I'm traveling, you know, not at the same time. Learning that new protein pathways while stroking it. You know, it's hard for me to have structure because I travel so much. If you're always in different places, it's hard to tell. I mean, coffee is always a have to have. I'm not going to have a successful day if I don't have some coffee at least. has it been um has it been hard to go back to i assume you travel back to the states to teach as well to drink american coffee now that you're on australian coffee yeah man it's it's hard it's rough yeah americans are like oh starbucks i'm like man that is shit i'll drink it if i have to but it's difficult yeah yeah 100 yeah no it's almost like a different drink like you go over there and you just accept okay i'm not going to get good coffee because you just if you have an expectation that you're going to find somewhere in america with good coffee it's just wrong it's the wrong expectation it's not going to happen sadly disappointed yeah sadly disappointed um and if you just go okay this is just like the coffee i'm going to be drinking over here you're fine because you don't have yeah you just don't have the wrong expectations and then every now and then someone might throw you a gift and you're like oh wow that was actually like okay yeah but americans don't know how to order coffees now like i've learned and i've had i've had to learn since I've been overseas because you walk in you say hey give me a coffee and they're like what kind you're like what what do you mean just pour it out of the little thing like I just want coffee and now it's like a pickle or cappuccino or this that and I'm like holy shit you know don't even know how to order and then you have to learn like how to order them in different countries like from here it's a long black in the in the UK it's an americano and it's like fuck man you can't keep up you're just so now I just order those all the time because that's that's pretty standard everywhere piccolo i didn't know that i drink picks over here but i didn't know they had them in america maybe i'll try next time but oh no i did it was they do know that we were there like what that was an espresso yeah go to america and ask for americano they will have no idea what you're talking about like ask for a piccolo they will have no idea what you're yeah no idea yeah that's what we experienced yeah it's difficult um okay third question luke is uh what is something recently seems like you do this a lot but what is one of the more recent things you changed your mind on that you held as a strong belief recently recently recently man that's uh that's a tough one i mean i've there's so many that's been over the years like going from being a low-carb zealot to being like kind of like the switzerlandan nutrition and saying hey man look all these all these things work they might work better at different times but realistically you just got to be consistent one of the things is like tracking like really getting on the tracking because i was always kind of uh well you know if you eat clean, you're fine. And then I'm like, okay, now that I'm tracking, got other people like that's super important. Um, it's something I wanted to say earlier that I didn't is we've gotten into trouble a little bit with people lately because we've been talking about, look at the, at the base level of things you have to, you have to know what you're eating, right? You have to, you have to respect calories at some time. Uh, and tracking is a part of that. People like, I don't get my clients to track. That's bullshit, blah, blah, blah. It's unnecessary. That's dieting culture. But the thing is, tracking is not synonymous with dieting. Tracking is about consistency and accuracy and understanding what you're doing. So those are two completely different things. I can track and not be dieting. I just want to see what, you know, what I'm doing. So I mean, there's a lot of things that I can't really think of anything lately. It's just, There's new things I've been learning that I'm layering on with some of the other stuff I've learned, especially about pathways through biochemistry, where I'm like, okay, I've been teaching this. And then, oh, shit, there's also this other pathway here. That's pretty cool. I've got to start teaching that. So it's more about for me right now is now that I've started to use common sense and actual textbook shit over the last few years is, you know, finding out other pathways and other things that fit into the pieces together that changes my idea about some protocols and things that we would do with people like and.

how it really affects the consequences of multiple chains, not just one or two. Do you remember some of the first things that you threw out in the biosec course when you guys started throwing stuff out of it? Yeah, like telling everybody they had to have hydrochloric acid, that they needed to take HCL and all that. And that came up with a discussion I had with Larry Vedado, which is another one of the guys that wrote a lot of stuff for biosec too. And I was talking to him one day and I said, why do we tell everybody that they have to have HCL? and why none of your supplements are going to work if you have HCL. And he looked at me and he goes, let me ask you something. You've read a lot of research on supplements and nutraceuticals. I go, yeah. He goes, did you ever read any single research paper that added HCL in with that supplement? I go, no. He goes, did the supplement work or the chemical work? I go, yeah. And he goes, there you go. He goes, it is highly helpful for a lot of people, but not everybody has to take it. So there's things like that. And then trying to convince people that carbs aren't the enemy, that's been a huge battle over the last seven years, eight years that I've been trying to tell people that, look, you can eat more carbs. You don't have to be low carb for life. And let's be honest. I mean, that's not a great way to live, not being able to eat chocolate or German chocolate cake anymore, pizza or cauliflower crust pizza. How fucking gross is that? I'd rather be fat. Like cauliflower rice. just give me the fucking jasmine and basmati man because that's what that's what i want you know they're coming up with some weird shit with cauliflower these days as a substitute yeah i hate that vegetable by the way i hate cauliflower if anyone can give me a good cauliflower recipe i'll take it but fuck no i like like mashed cauliflower but i'm not if i have my choice between that and potato i'm just kind of some nice fucking mashed potato shit But gluten, I've changed my ideas on gluten too. It's not as bad as people think. It's dose dependent and people need to stop blaming that for the reason why they're so fucked up. Yeah, celiacs have legitimate reason to not opt for gluten. But other than that, you're just holding up the whole line. Like we just want to get coffee. Fuck off with the muffin choice. Like you're overweight and you're fat. It's not the gluten. Yeah, exactly. Yeah looking for that magic pill All right final thing before we let you go look what is a book and or a quote that um you would recommend for the listeners uh i give you it the one i recommend everybody um but it's it's not for everybody because not everybody likes this kind of genre of things like i'm i'm into like sci-fi and fantasy shit right so then i i like terry goodkind's wizard's first rule i love the sword of truth series um it's it is uh it's set in a fantasy setting you know like sorcerers and you know swords and shit uh but the underlying tone is the philosophy so it's it's all about like objectivist philosophy of take care of yourself before you start taking care of other people don't set yourself on fire to save the world because if you set yourself on fire then you can't help anybody because you're fucking dead it's a good point yeah it's really a point it's like people that just get really sick and uh trying to like preach a certain diet and it's like you know the first animal that you have to take care of on a vegan diet is you know you you are you are the most important animal so they've got uh they've got a set of rules in it right and uh there's a there's a few of the rules that are pretty key and uh one of them is passion rules reason meaning that when you're passion overly passionate about something you throw a reason out the window so that goes hand in hand with that like if your trainer's vegan they're going to think that being a vegan is the best if they're carnivore they're going to think carnivore is the best but what's best is best for you so you've got to reason out what's actually going to be good and not allow your passion to overrule your common sense i like that nice yeah really good all right well luke you you've got obviously your company is muscle nerds people can go i would recommend first place people go follow is the instagram you guys put tons of really good content on there um i watch as much of it as i can i'm always checking for new stuff um where else what else can people get from you i know you just told us about a new garage gym you just opened up for mentorship yep so we've got that we've got the instagram is muscle nerds underscore health um we've got muscle nerds on facebook too we just don't really do a whole lot with that yet um so we've got our education stuff we have a foundations course that we put on which is there's an online component and an in-person component where it basically goes through nutritional biochemistry. How do we take food on our plate and turn that into usable energy? How do we get it into the cell? How does the mitochondria work And then how can you use different types of dieting to drive your body in a certain specific manner So you know if we look at if we look at the research I mean it pretty clear as if calories are, are set, if your protein set, it doesn't really matter fat or carbs, if you're playing a long term, but there are situations where one style of dieting may work better than the other. So we teach you how to take metrics on stress. We teach relative energy deficiency syndrome. We teach how to, how to lay out your calories and how to lay out your foods in a way that makes sense for you at that time that you're doing and understanding that you as a human, your body's going to adapt around whatever you give it. So what you're doing right now, you may need something completely different in six months. So we teach all of that, how to, how to set that stuff up. And it's a lot about stress management because stress will alter the way you handle your nutrition. Um, we've got that. We have a pretty intensive program design course that we do where it's about 10 weeks of online content and phone calls. And then we have a seminar at the end of it and you go through it three times. So you pay once, you go through it three times and we teach you everything on, we teach assessments, manual muscle testing, we teach body reading, we teach exercise selection, we teach sets, reps, time and attention. But most importantly, we teach what all those things actually do in your body. So if I lift in a certain way, this is the adaptation. So we can use a specific adaptation to drive the body in a specific manner. Um, and then we also teach the conditioning component. So if I'm going to lift like this, I need to condition like this. And this is how it's going to alter your health biometrics. And now how do we alter your performance metrics? Um, we've got that. And then we have, like we said, we built a gym. We bought some Atlantis equipment, which in my opinion is the best equipment on the face of the planet. And we've got it in our garage. People can come out and they stay with us for a weekend or a week or however long they want to come out. We have a cinema room in the house now, so we lecture out of it. We watch videos that are tailored towards what you're looking for. Pumping Iron. What's that? I was going to say Pumping Iron. Zoe wants me to teach a physical history, a physical culture history course, so we'll be watching Pumping Iron, West Side Burst of the World. We'll be watching all that stuff, right? I just had Ashley here, and he wanted to know more about conditioning specific to things like mixed martial arts. so we watched some UFC fights and I said okay now if you'll observe here see how he's a mouth breathing you see can keep his hands up this is what going on this is how then we go into the gym and I go okay these are the protocols you would probably use of that person and now let talk about the nutrition you would use so we can custom tailor education for coaches that want to learn more about all that stuff and then we can do it for gen pop if somebody just wants to come come up to brisbane and have a holiday and they just want to train all week and we feed you and we teach you and we write your programs for the next year and all that stuff we can do that type of thing too and lastly we've got our clinic uh that jason burgess runs in uh baloomba uh the suburb in brisbane so if you've got any chronic injuries you go in there and he sorts the shit out and if it's something that we can't sort out then we've got a referral network of professionals that we can send you to to get the right treatment options for you very comprehensive if there's something yeah if there's something not in there for you then we've got we've also got bespoke bespoke training so we do the online training thing with training, nutrition, conditioning, all that stuff. And then we've got group training as well. If the bespoke training is something that's more than what you need, we have standard online training as well. That's kind of a set template with nutrition and all that stuff. Oh, cool. Nice. All right. Well, Luke, we appreciate you being on. I'm sure this won't be the last time. And absolutely, if we get a chance to do one in person, I think you'll be even more fired than this. Awesome, guys. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks, Luke. Project, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Thank you to Luke for coming on the show. Make sure you check out the Muscle Nerds Instagram page and their website as well for everything that they're doing. Stay up to date. And if you enjoyed this episode, guys, if you got value out of it, make sure you share it, take a screenshot, post it on your Insta stories, tag us, tag Luke, tag Muscle Nerds as well. And then, you know, as well, if you feel like leaving us a review on iTunes, a five-star review is incredible. It goes a long way. helps boost up in the rankings and we're just forever grateful for your ongoing support guys thank you so much remember all the sponsors of this episode true coach and whoop are in the description of this episode so go check them out and we'll speak to you next week you