The essentials for success in bodybuilding and body transformations with Luke Leaman #159

# The essentials for success in bodybuilding and body transformations with Luke Leaman #159

**Channel:** Muscle Intelligence
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/muscleintelligence/E15920Luke20Leaman.mp3?dest-id=966710

Hey there, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Muscle Intelligence Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Pekulski. As always, another amazing guest coming at you right now. This podcast has evolved over the years, but continues to have its roots grounded in ultimately living your greatest life in a body you love. And today's podcast is very much going to help empower you to live your life in a body that you absolutely love. The internet, the media is blasted day to day with endless amounts of information that becomes very, very hard to sift through. It's hard to differentiate what's actually right, what's wrong, what's accurate, what's not, what will work for you, what might work for somebody else. Learning how to make decisions in the fitness industry with your health outcomes ultimately is imperative to your success. Simply following a plan or following someone else's plan may not always work unless you're getting real-time, up-to-the-minute changes and adjustments from somebody who is an expert. And today's guest is absolutely an expert. Luke Lehman joined me once again, a second-time guest of the podcast, to talk about everything to do with muscles and body transformations. An absolute wealth of information being passed to you through this podcast. And I know you guys are going to absolutely love it. Sometimes it can become challenging in the fitness industry to find people who don't only project their biases onto their audience, onto their followers. They have some agenda that they're trying to push and they push it. And that's, it is what it is. And Luke is definitely not one of those guys. The thing I love about Luke, he's a say it as it is kind of guy and does an incredible job conveying complex information in a way that's relatively simple and actionable. 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I'm sitting here talking to my buddy all the way across the world in Australia, Luke Lehman. Welcome back, man. Nice to be here. This is good. This is weird. Last time we were sitting in a living room in Melbourne. Yes. And now we're halfway across the world. So man, and without blowing smoke up your butt, I'm very grateful to have you back because there's very few people who I actually enjoy having conversations about muscle building with because most of the time it's the same stuff. And I like to talk about people who are pushing the paradigm and challenging things and thinking differently. And as we were just talking about prior to recording, I said, like, I was very interested in hearing your thoughts on periodization and programming because, you know, I've been building a course and doing a mentorship and, you know, I spent hours and hours and weeks and weeks developing my own thought process, months and years, obviously, developing my own thought process. But this seems like, and I could be wrong, it seems like there's very few people that are doing it in their own way, right? They're just kind of following what everyone else does and as I said, modeling strength and powerlifting. And I love to explore how you approach periodization And I love to talk about your course and love to talk about how you mentoring coaches but I just getting into you started talking about percentage periodization yeah I mean everyone looks at the hypertrophy stuff as it's very I don't want to say it it's very myopic the way people look at it right and you know I think part of the problem is is a lot of the evidence-based community where if you don't see it in a study, it doesn't exist. And so everyone keeps repeating the same thing and everybody's learning things from the same places. So most of the time you're going to, with traditional periodization, you're going to see a percentage-based model or a rep range-based model, but that rep range-based model is going to be based on a percentage of one rep max. So whatever your one rep max is, then you can work down. And there's a lot of different rep max continuums. The one I used, I learned from Charles Poliquin and it's very easy to memorize. So that's why that's the one I teach. And it's within point, whatever number from what everybody else uses. And so if we look at like traditional rep ranges, you're going to go eight to 12, right? Eight to 12, that's typical bodybuilder stuff. So you look at those percentages being somewhere around 77.5% to around 67.5%, right? And they think that that's the only way to grow, but it's not, right? You've got progressive resistance, obviously, you can keep adding weight to the bar. You've got mechanical tension, you've got muscle damage, you've got metabolic byproducts will stimulate growth. So in that case, you're looking at inflammatory markers, right? The more inflammation I can create that I can recover from, my muscle is going to swell and grow. So there's a, man, there's so many different things that people need to look at. There's some theories on lactate producing growth as well. You know, there's a lot of things you're not going to see really in the literature yet, because it just hasn't been studied enough, but people see it in empirical observation and some people have measured it, but it's just not in the literature. You know, then you've got the factor of food and supplements and you've got the the factor of what's actually causing the growth is it myofibular growth or sarcoplasmic growth and then people fight about that um and i think one of the arguments that people fight about is that you know you you can't just have sarcoplasmic growth without having myofibular growth right but in my opinion you can have myofibular growth with no sarcoplasmic growth right yeah you know so and then you've got various muscle fibers you're looking at what are you really expecting right now? There's a lot of levels, right? And that's what I say. The more you know about programming, the more complex it becomes and the longer it takes. I often tell people that like, hey, for me to write a six-week program can often take six to eight hours. And people are like, how is that possible? Because there's so many things, you know, my foundation of everything is exercise selection. So I want to make sure that I'm selecting exercises that fit the right objective for the right person, that are complementary to each other, that are maybe even synergistic to each other. And then, so that's step one. I'm I have to make exercises work as far as like, where are you mechanically in your ability to execute and skill? And then I'm going to try to find things that are synergistic. And then I start compounding variables on top of that of like, how do I accumulate volume or how do I accumulate some other variable of exercise? So if we're speaking specifically about myofibrillar hypertrophy and, you know, we're striving to accumulate protein. we're trying to start to accumulate tissue damage and ultimately tension um what's the first variable assuming assuming everything else is the same as far as exercise selection which is again we could spend an hour talking about that and i actually would like to um but going just just with respect to myofibular hypertrophy um do you have a particular favorite or a couple favorites that you're like hey this is how i tend to progress this it seems to work well for people or is that so subjective based on who it is yeah it's all it's all contextual depends who it is like am i dealing with an athlete who needs to grow or am I dealing with gen pop or am I dealing with a bodybuilder so like I'm of the firm belief that if you're a bodybuilder you don't really need to go below six reps there's really no point you're just you're wasting time unless you're doing you know very small blocks of that so I kind of like um what Chris Aceto used to talk about where he would do he programmed 10 to 12 weeks of like hypertrophy and he'd throw in two or three weeks of maximal strength work to create density. And I think that makes a lot of sense because increasing sympathetic tone is going to increase the density of the muscle or at least the way it looks because it's going to give you residual hardness from jacking up the nervous system. So just backing up one second, then you're, by the sounds of it, you're a fan of blocks. So if I'm doing hypertrophy block, like a 12-week block, I'm not mixing in multiple stimuli within that block. Typically, I'm like usually staying in this rep range. So I'm just specifically targeting that, that repringing that tissue quality. Yeah So I still like to use more traditional types of periodization but I don get crazy with the extremes of where I taking them right So, you know, when you're looking at various strength qualities like, you know, strength, strength, endurance, hypertrophy, functional hypertrophy, maximal strength, super maximal strength. With that type of physique stuff, I usually stay in a pretty narrow block and I keep it somewhere around functional hypertrophy, hypertrophy, and maybe a little bit of strength endurance. and i would rather what i would rather do especially if they're a high level if i want to build more volume and build more reps i'd rather do that as a giant set or a tri set more like milo sarcef type things so that i can keep the reps kind of kind of smaller so they can have more weight on the bar so i might use a mechanical advantage tri set or i might use um i might use like a more of a gbc i'll use gbc for muscle growth the way i see it is that um you know traditionally that's a fat loss protocol but if we're looking at that with kind of some of the theories that are floating around about inflammation and lactate producing growth as well well if i use a gbc and use excessive amounts of food and put them in a surplus there's something grow. So if you could explain what GBC is, driven body compound, I don't know if the listener knows what that is. So it's basically, it's something that Charles Poliquin came up with. It's based on the concept of peripheral heart activation. So they use peripheral heart activation as, come to the beginning as a circuit training. So you would basically do a lower body exercise, upper body, lower body exercise, and you basically move blood around the body to try to force more lactate production. And so when Charles looked at that, he thought it wasn't really, conceptually wasn't great to use in the gym because circuit training wasn't going to be as conducive for athletic training and fat loss as just focusing on big main exercises. So like a typical GBC template traditionally would be a quad base movement, then it would be a back movement and then you would move to a steer chain movement and a pressing movement and then you would finish off with arms and calves and abs and all that stuff um and so typically you would do let's say you did a some type of squat maybe it was a cyclist squat or hills elevated squat something like that you would rest 16 seconds or less and you would move to pull up or pull down or a row or whatever and you would repeat that four or five times you move on to your b sets And so by keeping the rest at a minimum and shuttling blood from the bottom to the top of the body, you increase lactate production, which there is for a long time. I couldn't find literature to support what he was talking about. But then I started finding some stuff last year during during the COVID lockdown. I had lots of time to read. And there is some pretty OK literature showing the increase in growth hormone from that will accelerate fat loss. Now, for me, it's always been about just increasing work capacity and just getting more density in the workouts and basically raising the heart rate and raising the VO2 max, which will elicit faster fat loss if you're in a caloric deficit. but from what I've seen using it with clients in a surplus, very good for building muscle and losing body fat pretty much at the same time. And it's from a time management perspective, it's pretty good because most of my clients only have two or three days to train. So full body is really going to be the way to go. Yeah. So as far as choosing exercises within that context, is it often just looking for generic exercises that you think are going to be most effective, like compounds style, or is it going to be relatively individualized? Yeah, it's going to be individualized. You've got to look at how the client built or they built for certain exercises. Some exercise is going to be great for building quads. Some aren't like a back squat and a bench press for most people. They're not great. A bench press isn't a great chest builder for people, but it's a great pressing movement. A squat is a great squat pattern movement, but it's not going to be as good at muscle building as something like a hack squat or a leg press, but it really depends on what I need to get out of the client. Most of the clients that I train here at our gym are gym pops. So we, we, we choose more movement based stuff and more athletic based stuff than we do bodybuilder for the fact that I don't have a lot of bodybuilding machines. So our only thing we can do are front squats, back squats, overhead squats, you know, low bar squats, box squats. So it's split squats. So it's, everything's about squatting and and traditional barbell stuff. But if I'm training someone online and they've got access to a really nice kit at gym, then we're gonna use a lot more machine-based stuff than I would in person at my gym. Very cool. So coming back to talking about staying within that hypertrophy range within a periodization block how long do you usually recommend somebody stay in a block or how long do you typically design it And then within let say we doing a six week block how do you build progress into the weeks So realistically, it's going to be dependent on, are you still seeing results? So if they are still seeing results, I don't change the program. So the week to week is exactly the same or are they changing? Okay. It would have been. So if it's, if it's somebody who's really high level, like I train a girl from Chicago, Krista Carlson. So she's an absolute animal and her, sometimes her goals will change. Like she's more physique oriented, but sometimes she wants to do some strength stuff. So then I'm like, okay, I'm going to do strength stuff. And I've trained her for about two years. And I know that she can do maximal strength for about two weeks before the shit hits the fan. and she loses her appetite, she can't sleep and all, you know, that type of thing. So what I do is I write a six week program, but I go two weeks of maximal strength. And then I move her to a week of more metabolic or hypertrophy work with a little bit more aerobics and a little bit less volume. She recovers. And then I move her back to, uh, back to the strength work and then back to the, uh, what we call more of like a least mode week. Um, and that's how I do deloads. I don't do traditional deloads where somebody's lifting really heavy. We just cut some of the sets out because what I've noticed is there's still that sympathetic neurological stimulus. You're just kind of turning it off. So it would be like if you were burning your hand on something and you started seeing your hand blister and you just turn the heat down a little bit, well, your hand's still getting burned. Why don't we put some ice on it instead? And I just totally made that up. So I hope that makes sense. But the way I see it is if you're going to do a deload, just do a massive deload and switch the emphasis. So if you're doing something that's highly neurological, just move to something that's more metabolic for a week, let them recover, let their metrics get better, and then you can smash them again. Yeah, so that's interesting. So you basically, just the way I view it, is you're kind of taxing different systems, right? So the nervous system versus the muscular system versus maybe the energy production, the mitochondria in the liver, the ability to clear lactate. So if you know someone is neurologically fatigued because of the sympathetic overdrive, you know switching to something that's more muscular based or more energy based meaning going to require the mitochondria produce more energy or tax the liver or just going to be a different system does that sound kind of sound like it's alignment yeah yeah that's pretty much it so and everybody has their individual tolerance of things like um i'm on the i've always been a strength athlete everything's always been an extreme fast heavy um violent type of thing Well, yeah, Texas high school football, right? But that's just the way I'm built, right? I've got a jacked up nervous system, massive ADD. I've always been a big guy, even not when I'm training. I didn't train for six years and I'm still 110 kilos. So it's like that works for me. I can go in and do twice a day, five days a week of 3-2-1 wave loading and be totally fine. But I can give that to someone else and it will crush them within a few days and they'll be massively neurologically overtrained and they can't handle it. So I got you. Yeah, you've got the whole the art of coaching. And what we should be doing is looking at that client saying, OK, when do your metrics change? When do your symptoms increase? OK, now I need to figure out what's causing the subjective and objective data to get screwed up because now I know you're overreaching. So now I need to pull you out of overreaching so you can supercompensate and get bigger and faster and stronger. So that segues beautifully into a question I had for you is when someone comes into your world for the first time, you've never worked with them. What are you looking at maybe subjectively or objectively to determine where this person is neurologically? So an example being some people, you know, tend to be very fast twitch, very sympathetically oriented. Some people tend to be slightly more slow twitch or more parasympathetically oriented or anywhere on that continuum. them. Obviously, they may require different types of stimuli. They may recover differently. They may be able to subject themselves to more or less work accordingly. So do you have some means of assessing people or is it just like, what do you look like and what's your athletic history? Yeah. So kind of our system that we've developed over the last six years is we want to look at subjective metrics, find out everything we can about how they feel and what they're feeling. And that's really important to people. You can't just look at objective data. I need to know like how they feel about themselves, how they feel about, on our questionnaire, we ask things like, how do you feel if someone comments negatively on your physique? How do you feel when somebody says something positive? How do you feel when you go off your nutritional plan? How do you feel when you miss a workout? So we ask very subjective questions about that. And then other things

How are you pooping on a scale of one to 10? How are you sleeping? How's your stress? What do you do for a living? How many hours do you work? So we're getting all this. You can answer those questions once. What we do is once because we maintain so much communication with our clients by six months into it. We know everything about them. And we know the tone of their emails and how they're talking to us on text or on video. We can tell when we start learning those personality swings and those mood swings. and so we'll get a good pattern of how long we can keep them on certain things, and then we also get some objectives. If they've got an aura ring, we'll get some of that information. We use elite HRV and a heart rate strap to get HRV, get morning heart rate, afternoon heart rate. We use body temperature. We use blood glucose if they'll take it, but we train probably 95% other coaches and other personal trainers, so they will get that type of data like the blood glucose, but most of your gen pop people aren't going to do that unless they're diabetic or pre-diabetic. Yeah. So we get all that stuff and then we use that as a guide. Once we get a good pattern and a good trend, we say, okay, this person's resting heart rate is way too high. Their blood pressure is way too high. Their body temperature is way too low. And then we determine what we're going to give them as far as conditioning, lifting, nutrition, supplementation and also lifestyle recommendations, we get them pretty good and pretty level, get them really healthy first. So we're all about health before performance. Of course. Yeah. We get them healthy first, then we start beating the shit out of them. And then we watch their symptoms. So if their symptoms go crumble, okay, let's take some of your metrics for four or five days. If we see that those metrics have gone too far off the baseline, we know they're overreaching, it's time to go to a deload. And usually we see about a week and then all of a sudden all their metrics get perfect again, and then we can beast them out again. So we go from, we get them healthy and then we go beast mode, then we go to least mode and then back to beast mode. Man, I love that you talk. I think that's why we get along well in this space is because I think there's not enough people going, okay, before, you know, everyone comes like, I got 12 weeks, let's get in shape. And I just told them, no, I was like, well, go work somewhere else. Like I really always say, I always jokingly say any chimpanzee can get you in shape just by starving you and giving you more cardio. That's not the goal. First, let's make you healthy. And that that's there's a lot of subjective and objective things there. I'd like to talk about all the objective things that you're looking at when someone comes in and says, hey, I want to make you healthy. And so what are the objective variables we're looking at there to to kind of the physiological prerequisites to to hypertrophy ultimately. Right. Well, how do we object to my health? I mean, we look at you got to look at things like we've got two different gut gut questionnaires we give people. Right. And the reason we do it's like a personality test. Sometimes they mark something zero on one, but then they click a yes on the other. So we we like to have things that kind of check some balances against themselves. So if their guts wrecked, they're bloating, gassy, you know, that they if they take a crap and it's peeling paint off the walls, you know, if they have burning in their stomach. We want to look at all that stuff first because you're not going to grow if you're not getting the food into your body. And people tend to think that just because you swallow food that it's in your body, but it's not. That alimentary canal that runs from your mouth to your anus has a protective barrier and not everything you eat will get in your body. So it's really important from a growth perspective that if you want to be in a surplus, eating 4,000 calories doesn't mean you're in a surplus if you're just pooping it out or if your bacteria is eating it and you're not actually getting it in you. So we want to clean up all that type of stuff. And we also want to see where your stress is. So if we look at a good HRV number, if we look at blood pressure, we can get a pretty good and heart rate, resting heart rate, we can get a pretty good idea of where's this person, where's their autonomic tone? Are they too sympathetic? Because if they are, that's not great for building muscle because you don't, you're stimulating muscle protein breakdown when you train, but then you have to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And if you're always catabolic because you're in a fight or flight pattern, your body never rests. You don't sleep well. You don't recover well. You can't train well. Your motivation is not there. And your compliance for meal prep isn't going to be great. How much are you looking at like blood markers and urine markers and stool? Do you ever look at those with clients or is that just kind of beyond the scope? Only when there's a pathological reason. So if we have somebody with Hashimoto's, if we have somebody with diabetes, then I'll take a look at that stuff. And if it's stuff that's easy to fix that we can work with their doctor on, then we'll send some letter to the doctor and work with them on that stuff. If it stuff that outside of my scope then I refer them to a dietician and make sure that we getting everything signed off of what we doing so that we don step out of our box and do something that going to be harmful to the client Yeah I ask because so many coaches out there come to me and they go you know I'm helping my client with their blood and their urine, their hormones and stuff. I'm just like, oh boy, I mean, you know, people don't understand the level of complexity, right? And this concept of a complex system where I change one thing potentially for the positive. And I don't acknowledge that there could be three other things that are happening on the back end that could be negative from that one positive shift that I made so I'm always curious how coaches especially smart ones approach this type of stuff so you see someone's ILK through the roof right or or their whatever uh you know their sorry IL6 through the roof you know what are we um is there is it just like hey go see your doc you have some inflammatory problems or are we going to go right after the gut Well, I mean, if we're looking at IL-6, that's what you said, right? IL-6? Yep. You're looking at, you know, overall systemic inflammation. So I'm going to start looking at immune system. I'm going to look at their training volume as well. Anytime you train, you're increasing IL-6. I'm going to look at CRP. If CRP, you look at like, if they haven't been sick and CRP is a bit elevated, then I know there's some systemic inflammation. So we want to look at, we might look at white blood cells. You might look at some of the markers there to see if there might be an underlying gut issue as far as a pathogen or bacteria or something like that. A lot of people walk around with subclinical gut infections they don't even know they have, especially on this side of the world, because they all go to third world countries. They go to all these places. They come home with three or four tourists they don't know they have, and they can't figure out why they feel horrible. in Texas we'd go to you know we'd go to Cabo we go to Cancun and the same thing would happen I actually had a guy uh years ago probably 16 17 years ago he was 200 he got 235 pounds pretty short got him down about 190 in a few months he decided to celebrate by going to Mexico I said okay I need you to take um take your hydrochloric acid and take your digestive enzymes take all this up be careful what you eat don't drink the water make sure you're not eating it you know don't go to food like food stalls and eat god knows what unless you're taking this stuff because you're going to get a pathogen he comes back he starts putting on gobs of fat he's putting on like two pounds a week and we couldn't figure out what the problem was um so i sent him to a doctor to get checked out and he had gotten something like seven to nine parasites that He picked up in Mexico and the doctor had to write him a huge protocol to get rid of it. And he got rid of it, but it was crazy because everything that he was doing that got him lean in the first place, nothing was working. We kept pulling calories. It wasn't working. Add cardio, add more training, get more sleep. And it was just the fact that he had a gut issue and that was making all of his endocrinology haywire. Yeah, I got that when I went to Bali, man. I came back and for like eight weeks afterwards, I was just a disaster. I was like, what is this? It was an accident. You know, one time I brushed my teeth. I think I just rinsed off my toothbrush with the water. I didn't think about it. Yeah. That was enough to give me a parasite. Same thing happened to me. Zoe and I went and I was in a pool and I'm swimming in the pool and I accidentally swallowed some pool water. And I'm thinking, surely they put chemicals in the pool to kill everything. Nah, man, I was so sick. It was coming out both ends. I was sleeping on the toilet for three days because every time I stood up, I just had to sit back down. So I took a pillow and I put it on the counter and I just slept on the toilet. And I lost nine kilos in three days. And I finally was I was well enough to go to the chemist to try to get something. And you've ridden the little scooters in Bali, right? Yeah. Like the roads are bumpy. so i'm i'm spending the whole time doing a kegel trying to keep myself from getting my pants and i get to the first pharmacy and i'm like give me some activated charcoal we don't have any i'm like what do you mean you don't have any it's bali you know we're gonna get bali belly so they gave me imodium didn't do anything finally found a hippie fufu place with activated charcoal i took a couple of teaspoons stopped me up i didn't poo anymore but then i didn't shit for two weeks So it was like one or the other. I looked amazing though. I don't know how periodization turned into shitting on a scooter, but that's how a lot of things go, right? Well, it's important. That is part of periodization. When you look at most people look at periodization as far as just the training aspect. But you have to match the nutrition and the lifestyle and you have to match the gut and the brain and the mitochondria and everything else with it. Or you're not periodizing. Yeah. How does the body adapt to the stimuli right And I often talk about this reality where if your training isn your biggest stress then you just can respond to the training right So you have to look at like what are the interventions to start gaining control of your psychological perception to the stresses of your life? And if you're someone who's aiming to improve your physique and have a great physique, you have to create a life that ultimately allows training to be the greatest stressor and that's in my eyes the only way you're ever going to adapt um because you know i'm sure you get people who come in and they've got all these other things going on and they just don't respond as well and you're like well that that has to be an expectation that gets managed like you know i have clients who i work with they're like i'm not responding really well but they've got this and this and this and this that are that are probably greater stresses physiologically to their body so no matter what type of strength training stress you're subjecting them to their body just isn't prioritizing responding to that and adapting to that it's prioritizing these other things and I think that's a huge thing to think about when it comes to periodization that most people don't consider is like, what is the biggest stressor in your life? Right. Is it finance? Is it relationships? Is it whatever? You know, COVID. It could be a lot of things. Yeah, I like that. I like training should be the biggest stress in your life. That's a that's actually a really good way of putting it. Like if you want results, then you're going to have to be stressed in the gym, but you need to be relaxed everywhere else. Yeah, it's not getting the most out of it. Yeah, it's two hours of sympathetic and 22 of parasympathetic. And that's maybe like ideal, but I think that's the way you got to contextualize it. It's like, you're not going to grow. I mean, bodybuilders grow because they take excessive amounts of anabolics. It's, you know, I call it the ultimate autonomic override, right? It's just like, no matter how much sympathetic arousal you've got, you're still going to grow. So that's why bodybuilders are able to grow. And people always throw that back. They're like, oh, bodybuilders grow and they're always stressed. Yeah, but they're taking more gear than most people should ever look at in their life. But if you don't have that lever, you have to look at, well, what are all these mechanisms and interventions I could use to ultimately regulate the autonomic nervous system? I think people don't understand as well the bodybuilders is they're taking also things you've never even heard of and you won't hear for another 20 years. Unnecessarily most of the time. Yeah. I mean, I lived that world for a long time. Like I would meet guys and like, I'm taking this and this and this. I'm like, what the fuck is that? And you know how they train, right? That's always the funny thing. It becomes, it always seems like those guys, and this could be an overgeneralization, but those guys are the lower level bodybuilders. It's not usually the high level pros and the Olympic guys. It's the guys who aren't quite good enough or the high level nationals or, you know, the local bodybuilders who are taking exponentially more than everybody else. And they think that you got to take this much to get to the high level. They don't put any emphasis on training. I don't put any emphasis on nutrition. I don't put any emphasis on recovery modalities or someone at my level. Like I was OCD about that stuff, man. Like I was neurotic about all these things. I was absolutely obsessed with what's my recovery look like? What's my nutrition look like? What's my training look like? And then this other thing was just an augment. And I don't say I was innocent. I wasn't an angel, but it certainly wasn't to the extent that I hear some of these other guys just just abusing substances. Yeah, I never understood that because, I mean, I trained for 13 or 14 years before I ever took a steroid. And the first thing I took was Bravo T200 from Mexico, which was underdosed. You know, you get eight mils in a 10 mil bottle. You didn't know what you were taking. It would cause massive bloat. And we're taking Reforbit B and we're going to Mexico and getting all this stuff. And, you know, then we started getting into the point where you had really high quality stuff coming out of Mexico. They got smart. They said, oh, these people want, well, they want steroids. We'll give them really high quality stuff. So they started doing that. And I was never a big cycle person, even when I was 270 pounds. It was like, you know, I took the minimal effective dose to get as big as I could. And then when that didn't work, I said, well, I'll just try more stuff. And all it did was give me more side effects. Yeah. So what are you looking at? If I say, Luke, I want to be a pro bodybuilder. What are all the boxes that I need to check as being things that are essential to my success? Well, the first thing you need to look at is do you have the genetics to be a pro bodybuilder? You know, just because, and the thing is just being able to get big isn't enough. You have to have, there's a certain bone structure. You need a certain joint structure. There's certain tendon length you need, or your muscles just aren't going to look good. So that's the first thing. So let's put that aside and say, you know, I want to make the most of my physique. Like I want to be the best me I could possibly be. Yeah. The first thing is take as little gear as you need. We're talking gear too. You're going to be a pro, right? Well, even before that, let's say before we get to that. Before that, number one, make sure your training is sound. Make sure it makes sense and it conducive to what you want It specific to the adaptation you looking for Making sure that you not doing too much too soon Like people will get Flex Magazine and they start doing you know some ridiculous workout written by a ghostwriter that the person that they say is doing it hasn even done it Like, don't don't hit yourself with a nuclear bomb when a BB gun is all you need at first. save the big stuff, save the advanced stuff until you have a good foundational concept of basic, just getting really good at basic stuff and taking your time and understanding that this is a process. You're not going to be, you're not even going to be a good amateur bodybuilder for four or five years. You know, they think that we're longer. They think that, okay, I'm just going to start training and in three months, I'm going to win my first show. That's not how it works. that's that's how instagram makes you think it works but that's not how it works it was eight years of training for me before i ever even thought about stepping on stage and even then i thought i wasn't ready that was the time back then right like when when i was a kid and we were getting in the bodybuilding people would train you know they would train for 10-15 years before even thinking about jumping on stage now people think they can do it in 10 weeks or 10 months and just doing gratification. So before you go into other stuff, I want to kind of decode this a little bit and dissect this a little bit. So, you know, start with what? You're saying like, make sure you kind of get by with the minimum effective adjustment. What does that look like? What are your kind of priorities and pillars for someone with just respect to training? Like, what should I be looking at? Is there specific skills I should be good at? Is there specific periodization that I should be looking to implement? What would you say is like foundational? I think from a training perspective, I've got a saying, like if you're looking at bodybuilding, you're sculpting, right? You're doing, you're making a biological sculpture. If you look at how someone makes a big statue, they take a big piece of granite. So they hit, they hit a quarry with a piece of dynamite and they make a big fucking rock. So the first thing you should do is just put on raw size, just take time building everything big. And then what's the next thing a sculptor does? they take a big chisel and they start chiseling out pieces. So now once you've built the base, now you can start looking at where your weaknesses are and maybe you need to bring your arms up, your legs up. So you prioritize that. And then once everything starts getting in the balance, then you take smaller chisels and you start tapping away at stuff. And as you tap away at stuff, you start seeing where you have more weaknesses that you then have to rectify. But I think that... So does it just look like getting fat? Does it just like get as big as you possibly can no absolutely not that's that's the one thing i was about to say next you you don't the fatter you get uh and now here this is something i can't prove yet but uh it makes sense to me right so if we look at the ways that we trigger anabolism part of its uh part of its insulin and and growth factors stimulating its receptor getting amino acids in the cells but the fatter you get the more inflammatory chemicals you're going to create of course And those inflammatory chemicals are going to desensitize the insulin receptor and other growth receptors. So you get to a point where the bulking gets too far and you're too fat to get big without drugs. And a lot of the guys that get big and they're a little bit fatter than they need to be, like some of the world's strong men and some of the big bodybuilders, people don't understand. They're taking drugs to override that process. But, you know, if you're looking at it from a purely physiological perspective, you don't want to push yourself to the point where now you're not growing correctly or the right tissue. You're getting big, but it's not the big you want. So you want to make sure you don't get too fat. I think that, you know, once you stop, can't see the shadowing of your abs, you probably need to do a mini cut. Right. So I think once you start getting close to 20%, and that's being very conservative, not being conservative, being very liberal with it, I think people probably shouldn't get much above like probably 16, 17% before they need to cut a few percent off. And what's crazy to me is it's so easy to cut a few percent of body fat off. You can do that in two or three weeks, especially if you're coming off of a big bulk where you're set at a perfect time to lose weight. There's no reason to push into the 22, 23, 24%, which a lot of guys do. And I think they're in denial about how fat they are, which is easy to do when you look really good in clothes. And you look massive in clothes. And people are commenting on how big you're getting. And then you don't think to look at yourself. And then one day you look in the mirror and you're like, oh, shit, I've taken this too far. And you look down, you can't see your dick anymore. Like, you've gone too far. True story. So speaking of training, do you have an approach to how you might choose exercises for someone in that scenario? Meaning, are there certain ones you think like, hey, you need to get really good

this, this, this, and this, if you want to build that. Yeah. I think, you know, getting good at the, at the basic stuff, um, getting good at squat pattern, getting good at pull patterns. I mean, it's gotten really trendy these days. I don't know about your view on this stuff. People are like, oh, you know, you know, front squats, not great for bodybuilding back squats, not great, great for bodybuilding, just use machines and all that. But realistically, it, to me, it is, um, it's taking a very myopic viewpoint of the stuff and the thing is like some of the biggest growth stimulus stuff you can do are these big compound movements and as far as keeping the body if they're done correctly the body has made them do those patterns um i've got a very specific um response to that and i think it's i mean it's the most logical i've ever uh come up with and so you you know people as well as i do and i can think of someone offhand that we both know but i won't mention names who can let's say someone can do a nine plate hack squat super strong like unbelievably strong crazy leg extension um but they don't squat let's say they get a nine plate hack squat but they're doing a two plate squat right what does their hip mobility look like what does their spinal mobility look like you know but without even having to to see it you know someone who can if there's that big of a differential between what i can hack squat and leg extension what i can squat by definition you know my hip mobility is shit and you know my spinal mobility shit. We know that. So the way I view that is internal stability versus external stability, right? So external stability with a hack squat and leg extension, I have a machine or apparatus there to stabilize. Therefore, the musculature of the hip, pelvis, and spine isn't required to do work. It's just turned off. So I'm getting really good at this extension pattern. I have nothing at the hip that's able to stabilize. So the quad obviously originates on the hip. So if I want to generate stability at the origin end, I need to have the muscles there working. So if I have that much of a differential between a squat and a hack squat, I know your mobility is going to be poor. I know your spine is going to hurt. I know your hips are going to hurt always. Like these people are going to constantly get injured. So what I view the necessity of squats, lunging, and front squatting is whether or not, irrespective of the fact that they're a good or a bad exercise for muscle building, to me, it doesn't matter. What matters is, do I have the ability to generate a near equivalent internal stability with my musculature as I can external stability with my apparatus. Because as those things scale, I'm going to have improved internal stability. Therefore, I'm going to have improved mobility because I have to have mobility to access the position or otherwise I can't squat. So when I see someone that's got a big differential there, I'm literally going to pull them off the leg extension in the hack squat and go, hey, you're not allowed to do that anymore. You got too much horsepower, not enough steering wheel right so you know your alignment's going to be broken if because we hit we hit the gas pedal something's going to explode and so that's kind of how i view the necessity of squatting and front squatting again i think it's a useful thing to do for um for muscle building for some people i would definitely argue that that hack squats and leg extensions are better as far as direct isolation to a muscle but it can't be in isolation it has to be both of them growing in tandem yeah and the thing is like in the last five years i've gotten into the manual therapy side of things so i do faster stretch therapy i do massage uh stretch neurostem all this stuff and the bodybuilders that are the most fucked up are the guys who don't do full range of motion and they never do squat pattern they never that it's always on a machine or that's just junky form. So, and you know, the, the old, like the, you, you were talking about this well in Melbourne, talking about like a muscle centric versus movement centric movement. And I've always done kind of the Paul check thing of isolate before integrate and looking at that thing. And you know, it's, it's just a matter of semantics. We're both saying the same exact thing. And so I look at some of this stuff where people are talking about the intention training and just origin to insertion and things like that, that's good. But the problem is that that's not how the body works. So when you start looking at fascial lines and how things work in concert, you're going to be limited on how much weight you can use with that type of stuff, which is going to limit some of the growth stimulus. And you're going to create dysfunction at some point that you're going to have to fix later because let's say you're doing like a lat specific row. If you're doing that, That's great. But if you do that too much and you don't get all the other muscles around the scapula and the low back and the thoracic spine and the cervical spine, if you don't get those to move with it, eventually that muscle is going to dominate something and throw something else off. Now you're injured. Now you can't train or now you're in pain and that increases sympathetic drive, which limits your recovery. So there's a lot of other factors into it. So I still love doing more athletic based movements for bodybuilders to keep their body tip top and moving like it supposed to But then we'll supplement that with some of the more specific things like the leg extension or a last specific pull down or whatever you're going to use for that stuff. um one of the things that i like to use um that i've been talking about for over half a decade that is now coming out in the research is that people don't train positions in the length and state enough and that's causing a lot of issues where things get tight and they destabilize and then other muscles have to take over and it's subjective too right like just because you think a muscle's length and doesn't mean it is right so like any lat as an example if your serratus isn't actively actively contracting you're not lengthening your lat so there needs to be uh some awareness of what that actually is and i think people just go it feels length and that's enough but it goes deeper than that right it goes a lot deeper that if you're doing say like let's say we're doing a pullover and you're lying your ribs to flare you can't keep them down or you can't like you said they can't get the serratus to to create that coupling between the ribs and the scapula. And if you don't, if you don't keep that stuff locked in, then you're getting fake length on the lat. The lat's not actually lengthening out. You're going to have to figure something else out or you need to kind of regress back and start working on those smaller muscles around the ribs and scapula that people don't take care of, especially bodybuilders. Like most of my body they're doing shit tons of serratus work. We're doing a lot of stretching. I know stretching, everyone hates stretching but if it works it fucking works and so we're doing a lot of stuff for either soft tissue on the uh the subscap and the teres minor or teres major uh in concert with trying to strengthen the serratus anterior and get all that stuff pulled back into place so they eliminate shoulder pain yeah i think people don't acknowledge what length and muscle is like even at a pec like just because you're at the bottom of a fly doesn't mean you have a lengthen pec like you're not externally rotated the shoulder you're not actually lengthening your pec and when i started incorporating that stuff you know years ago pain just went away man i was like man my you know and the way i equate it in my brain is the greater the distance the more the body is dependent on on kind of proximal stability or generating proximal stability right so um if i if the weight's close to me the body is kind of less dependent or requiring less proximal stability of the joint so as i get it further away from me and i get that muscle fully lengthened it's almost requiring this 360 degrees of stability right so rather than it's like balancing joint forces so rather than one thing is going to have be hypertonic and trying to compensate for something else in the back that's not working by taking it to that almost like vulnerable length of that muscle of the agonist muscle now requiring the antagonist to activate and turn on and create more tension as a state as a means of stabilizing in order to generate torque in the opposite direction as soon as i started doing that i was just like man i feel like i feel like a newborn baby with my joints. Yeah. And a lot of this stuff, we were teaching at a very low level, some of this stuff in the PICP program that Charles event, like doing things like working the lower traps, working trap three and four, working on your rhomboids, working on the serratus and in diagnosing what needs to happen. So I think people don't put enough emphasis in that. So when I give bodybuilders lower trap raises or serratus wall slides or wall angels, they think it's stupid because like, oh, I look ridiculous. I'm like, yeah, but look, you're shaking and you can't even get in the right position. So this is exactly what you need if you want to get out of pain and get the right muscles growing. Because if this stuff is not in balance, you're not actually working the muscle like you're supposed to be working it. And this is why your upper chest looks like shit. yep dude so much so much wisdom there so coming back to you know that that kind of went down this path of um you know what training might look like for people in the beginning i guess to summarize for the listener it's it's like you know making sure you're getting full range challenge ultimately like training training the length and range making sure you're doing your basic compounds making sure you can ultimately access full range of motion and then stabilize full range of motion seems like you know you and i are talking the same language as far as what the prerequisites are for hypertrophy in the gym. Now, if we look at kind of physiological prerequisites for hypertrophy outside of the gym, or like I'd say, someone comes to you and says, Luke, I want to make the most of my body. One of the things that you're kind of saying, hey, go pay attention to this. So how much attention are you giving to recovery and what are you using as your modalities? How much are you paying attention to nutrition? What else is playing into it? How much is aerobic capacity important to you? How much is body fat and hormones important to you? Yeah I think that what you just said the aerobic stuff it funny because when we started talking about doing more aerobic conditioning the industry was going one way I was going the other That because of Charles I mean Charles was the reason that I went that way You but i think not to speak bad but i think that was his you know he was very influential and everybody followed i think too like people people misunderstood what he was saying right because they weren't putting in the context he trained high level olympic athletes and all almost all of them were shot put you know this because they were mainly strength stuff weightlifters and that type of thing. And so when you look at now looking at towards bodybuilding and everybody's going, well, we're going to move away from, you don't need aerobics to get lean. You're right. You don't, but it makes the process a hell of a lot easier. Yeah. And it makes muscle growth a lot easier too. And it allows you to eat a lot more food and oxidize food at a better rate. So yeah, it was funny because I started, I started making Poliquin coaches do aerobics because when I left group, I had all these coaches that came to me and this is how I figured out all the metric stuff. I was looking at these guys, eight pack abs, veins in their forearm or veins in their elbows and fingers, right? They look fantastic. Their hair was falling out. Their thyroid was dysfunctional. Their testosterone was low. They had all these issues. They couldn't sleep. They were convinced they couldn't have a carbohydrate without getting fat. They had all these issues, pre-diabetic. It was nuts, but they looked phenomenal. And so I started taking all these metrics and looking into it. I'd have guys with a resting heart rate of 85 to 95. Their HRV would be like 48. Their blood pressure would be 150 to 200 over 100. As I started thinking about this, what's the one thing they're not doing? They're not doing aerobic conditioning. So I started making them do that. The metrics all got better and they all started growing. And that was the first thing they started telling me is my lifts are going up and I've put on like three kilos of size in the last six weeks. I'm getting leaner. And I'm getting leaner. I don't understand it. And I can eat five or 600 more calories. So then it's okay. Let's create a system around this stuff. So I think a lot of people don't, they just jump into this stuff. They just want to put on size. They don't think about the fact that the healthier you are, the better you're going to recover, the more muscle you're going to put on and the more strength you're going to get faster. I tend to use the soundbite of I take an autonomic view of performance, meaning what is the state of the autonomic nervous system and what can I do to intervene and make it ultimately more adaptable, right? And it's a soundbite. It's an overgeneralization, but it's a good perspective for people to start going, well, what is the autonomic nervous system doing? So if I'm in a state of high sympathetic arousal, I'm not building muscles, so I need some parasympathetic interventions. And aerobic fitness ultimately is a very good lever, not maybe the best lever, but certainly a very important lever in parasympathetic stimuli. It's huge. You've got a parasympathetic stimulus. There is something I got from Stuart McGill. There's an analgesic effect from it. How many bodybuilders do you know with low back issues and they're in chronic lower back pain? A lot, but I think that's poor diaphragm function from what I can see. I don't know if Stuart McGill talks about that, but I find that- Is it a chicken or egg thing? Is the diaphragm dysfunctional because you're overly stressed? Is the diaphragm dysfunctional because your psoas and your QLs are jacked up? And they're eating so much food. The stomach's always full and the diaphragm can't expand down to the cavity, right? That's it. So you've got, I mean, there's a lot of different factors. Breathing's a big deal right now too. Everybody's getting the breathing. But it's like, okay, guys, hold on. Let's not do the typical industry thing and go too far that direction. There's other factors to breathing as well. You know, you do the PRI stuff. You can think about that, but you also start thinking about hip stability. Did the diaphragm, did you lose hip stability because of the diaphragm or did you lose the diaphragm because of the hip stability issues? So you kind of have to take a multifactorial approach. But one of the things I got from Stuart McGill was doing more aerobic activity has an energistic effect and helps eliminate lower back pain. So, I mean, think about all the times you've been on D-ball or anadrol and you do two sets of squats and you have to sit down because your lower back is so pumped up. you can't stand up straight. So, you know, bodybuilders need to start thinking about that type of stuff too. And understanding that aerobics are not the, uh, aerobics are not a negative thing and that walking. Yeah. That's the most aerobic thing you can do, but that's rate limiting. You don't have, you don't have time to walk four hours a day, but you can do an hour cardio a day and get kind of the same effect, um, and also get more adaptations for the aerobic system. But then you also have to know when do I need to pull that out because you don't need to do endless amounts of calorie forever. You just need to do them until you get the adaptation you're looking for. Then you pull that stuff down and you don't really need it unless you're using it as a caloric funnel at this point or unless you see your metrics go haywire. Yeah. And then when you pull it out, your body responds like a sponge, right? I always say like you're kind of wringing out the sponge and you let it go and it's just your body just responds. And you get people putting on 10 and 12 pounds in three weeks you know five six kilos in three three weeks and it all muscle and they mind because your insulin sensitivity is optimized your angioid sensitivity is optimized your recovery is amazing. So that's, again, a point that's important to acknowledge is aerobic fitness is the key, or one of the key predetermining factors of your recovery between workouts, but also between sets. You get a lot of bodybuilders who take five, 10 minutes between sets because they simply can't recover. And just doing a little bit of work, a little bit of aerobic work allows you to increase the density of the workouts without increasing the perceived exertion so therefore you're getting more ultimate work in less time and i think that's just such an ideal circumstance as well as then recovering more uh more rapidly between workouts which again get back in the gym faster why wouldn't we be doing aerobic fitness almost you know three and four times a week i think is it would be a good foundation for most people yeah i think one of the things that i've noticed is um a lot of bodybuilders and and gen pop as well even worse they have a low vo2 max so you know we test people out at you know 35 vo2 max or less and we've noticed if we can get them into the 50s everything changes that tends to be like the magic so if we give them eight eight weeks like two two four week blocks of aerobics and we might be doing some steady state we might also be doing aerobic intervals, Tabatas, reverse Tabatas, things like that. If we can jump that up about 20 points, everything changes. Their work capacity changes. They start fat basically just falls off of them out of nowhere. They can eat more and lose weight. They can have a lot more carbohydrates without worrying about getting fat. They sleep better, their guts better. And as long as we can maintain that, we raise the VO2 max. When that ceiling's up, lactate threshold can now move up as well, which means they can train harder without so much burn. We've had guys that we give them a 12 rep max on the bar, and by set four, their legs are on fire. That's pretty common, but it's not normal. If I can raise your aerobic capacity, now you can actually hit the 12 reps with more weight, which means more growth and more recovery. Is that intervention you use in the beginning with many people? Because I've had a lot of clients who come in, You know, like I really hate the burn and I get such terrible burn. It interferes in my workout. So that's exactly where my brain goes. It's like I need to improve your CO2 tolerance and VO2 max. Yep. Yeah. So that's basically not everybody, but most everybody. People tend to come to us when they're really jacked up. So they've been to six or seven other people and no one's been able to fix it. They come to us like, okay, we're going to do the opposite of what they were doing before. And so we'll do some testing. We'll do a 12 minute cardiac output test. We'll see where their resting heart rate is versus their maximal heart rate. and if that's that gap is too narrow then your vo2 max is going to be pretty shit so we're going to prescribe you know good six to eight weeks of aerobic training then retest it um because there's no point just jumping into a specific physical routine if you can't if you're not healthy enough and generally you're not prepared for it so we'll go through um pretty pretty heavy amount of aerobics initially and it's different right most people put the aerobics at the end because they're chasing calories. Well, from my perspective, I'm chasing adaptation. So if I put it at the first, it's going to make every phase after that even better. And they're not going to have to do a lot of cardio to then, you know, to create a calorie deficit at that point, because they're just burning through so much. And then we do typically we'll do what we call backloaded structural balance. So this is where we do a lot of unilateral stuff. Most of the stuff is training in the length and ranges. We'll use stretching in the workout. We've got kind of a concept of if we look at things that are too tight, we need to loosen those up, and then we need to strengthen them in their new range of motion. So let's say somebody with massive anterior pelvic tilt, and we find that the rect fem is pulling too much and the hamstrings are too much length and it's jamming the lower back, and we start looking for things like that. We might actually stretch the quad and then do a weight of mobility movement. So it might be a couch stretch into a split squat or a lunge stretch into a Bulgarian or something like that. And then looking at the hamstring, well, it's already in a state of stretch, but so it's going to be long and weak. So we put it in a lengthened position and strengthen it there with an isometric position. And then we put them in a fully shortened position. So we might do a Geronda leg curl or like a TRX leg curl or something like that in order to get the hamstring to start to shorten more. so it pulls their hip back in the right position and relieves the lower back yeah and i often will throw in just on top of that just the kind of synergistic relationship between hamstring obviously pulling posterior and the abdominals pulling posterior as well as far yeah so most of the time i find people can't get into a posterior pelvic tilt one hamstring is obviously weak at all lengths and typically the rectus as well because because of that default anterior pelvic tilt. And yeah, those two things are just,

Sometimes even with just doing a glute bridge, but pulling into the posterior pelvic tilt seems to be a good way to teach people kind of positional control. Yeah, and thinking about when people do glute bridges, unless they're instructed correctly, they just basically raise the hips. They don't think about, okay, you've got all these muscles that are creating a force couple. So it's not just about, I tell people to think about their ass cheeks like two corkscrews and you want to try to screw them up. but then you also want to try to pull your the the asis towards the ribs right we've got to learn how to get the lower rectus abdominus and the obliques to create posterior tilt it's not just about the butt it's about the butt's relationship with everything else so what what i'll tell guys is just just try to take your dick to your chin right that's what you're trying to do and in order to do that you're going to have to pull with your abs and when i tell it's more metaphorically imagine you had a penis and you're trying to lift the towel with your penis because they've all been with somebody if they're straight they've all been with a dude who's gotten a boner and put a towel or a hat on his dick and lifted it up and down made a joke about it kind of a universal thing right but yeah i think that's that's amazingly useful because i mean from my experience 75 of the population has an excessive anterior pelvic tilt and has no idea how to fix it and i think it's it's you know mindlessly going after hamstring contraction without acknowledging lengthening shortened positioning honestly going after goo contraction without acknowledging the additional function as well as hip extension in ultimately anterior pelvic tilt or posterior pelvic tilt and external rotation. So incorporating all those functions into those exercises is what ultimately makes it a useful intervention, right? People just bang their head against the wall and go, I can't or I'm tight or don't understand the intricacies of like the simple intricacies, right? And that's, I think, what we kind of, where we kind of meet is like, it's so simple, but nobody's talking about it, or very few people are talking about it. And it's like, it's the, what the, what the trainer and coach needs to understand is they need to understand a very complex manner, but then they need to be able to simplify the cues and what they give to the client. Because the client doesn't need to know all the different muscles and their relationships in this stuff. What's that? Or do they care? No, they care. they just need no application so the coaches need to know this much in order to teach the client this much right the problem is people don't know this much they only know this much and um that that creates a big issue because people don't have a good um a lot of trainers don't have a good knowledge base of applied anatomy and what happens when a joint rotates and how that how you create that rotation how you create force coupling between everything and what happens when you put a muscle in a different position and muscles don't act the same in every joint position they switch roles and they switch you know some things become prime movers and stabilizers or fixers and everything changes depending on where you're at in the movement and that from exercise selection that makes a big difference huge difference tell me about your periodization course because it sounds like uh you've got a better handle on this stuff than most people uh or maybe all people so i'd love to have you tell us tell the audience what your course is about and where they can find it? Yeah. So we've got kind of the flagship course, the program design. So it's basically you pay one time and you go through it as many times as you need to understand everything. And it's massive. It's got to be over 120 to 140 hours by now. So basically you sign up, you're in it for life until you just decide not, you don't want to do it anymore. And we go through stress module, how that affects everything. So we talk about autonomic tone. We talk about how to measure that, how to regulate that, how to measure symptoms and objective measures how to assess those and then how to create protocols We talk about the standard basic you know the standard standard basic uh periodization theories linear alternating uh we go into conjugate concurrent types of training things like that, uh, how to lay out a workout, how order of exercises, how to think outside the box too. Like here's, this is traditionally what you're going to be taught. But if you figure that stretching between this exercise and this exercise will create a solution. Okay. Then we're going to do that, but you're only going to know that through the assessment modules. So there's a couple of weeks of assessments where we go through manual muscle testing, length tension, looking at where somebody should be, when the joint's in a certain position, how to assess that, how to interpret all that. And then we go into conditioning as well, how to lay that on and long-term programming. Yeah, that sounds awesome. So I did do a mentorship and I wrote a 63-page doc on programming, then a separate 27-page doc. So I got this 90-page document on programming. And I'm just kind of like, what am I going to do with this? Does anyone actually want to read 90 pages of programming. But now it makes me feel better that you've done 140 hours. Yeah. I mean, we've done everything on video, right? Everything's on video. And it took, you know, it's taken us years to put this stuff together completely. We just added a sales and marketing thing that we hired somebody else to put in for us. And we're not big on the sales and marketing stuff because it is important, but it's important after you know what the hell you're doing. Sure. And that's what my mentorship is, man. It's like, I'm going to teach you how to do stuff and sales and marketing. Once you're a good coach, you know, people just come to you. That's it. Yeah. That's it. Like in the mentorship I do. So I've got a private mentorship thing as well. That's about 42 hours. And the biggest thing from that, the people that have done all of our stuff, they've done foundations program design, the mentorship, they easily triple or quadruple their income without, I don't teach them any, I'll teach themselves if they want. I'm not good at marketing. I can teach you sales, but the main thing is you get such good results that you end up on a waiting list. And then the first sales thing I'm going to tell you to do is double your prices. And then they're on a bigger waiting list, you know, and it's, it's just because they're getting better results. It has nothing to do with them doing fancy Facebook ads or any of that stuff. Yeah. One of the, one of the things I do in my mentorship is accountability and like, I'm keeping you accountable to being a better version of yourself. And I think that in and of itself, if you taught them nothing else would allow them to be better coaches because they're putting you know the rubber meets the road man it's like are you setting goals you're achieving goals are you training hard to self are you proving to yourself you're capable and you start to understand like yeah i can do this stuff and when you believe that now you become inspiring and obviously then i'm building a skill set on top of that but i think the number one thing that i find or a lot of coaches are missing still don't do it themselves like so there's this this interesting dichotomy that exists in our community i think we briefly alluded to this is like you have the theory people over here and you have the practice people over here and it doesn't It seemed to be enough of this, right? It was a very small group of people who were doing theory and practice. And those are the ones that cut themselves apart. And when you apply what you are learning and you practice what you preach, you become a valuable asset. If you're just someone who reads books, you're an asshole oftentimes, right? Like you have this great theoretical knowledge, but you just have a big ego because you think you know what you're talking about, but you don't have the fortitude to apply it. And that's just so common in what we do. And that's why there's this separation in the science community, quote, unquote, the data-driven or the, you know, whatever the hell they call themselves now, as compared to the people in practice. And I think, you know, there needs to be more of the intermingling where the rubber meets the road. Yeah. Yeah, I think, like, one of my mentors, Dr. Warren Bannock, I think he says it best. He's a PhD, and he works with athletes. And he says, look, I'm not evidence-based. I'm evidence-informed. So if they see this stuff's working, they're going to use it. And then they'll test it in the field. Because you know often what you see in a study that done in a lab is not going to correlate really well with what actually happens when you in the field doing the thing you doing and and equals one right it always just man like contextually who is who is this person what their state of the nervous system what the state of their their endocrine system what's the state of their brain uh you know muscle lengths mechanics so many considerations that uh you know you're looking at man so dude it's been an absolute pleasure it always is uh and i'm so grateful for the fact that you're teaching people and making this fitness industry a better place for coaches to ultimately apply your knowledge and then make it their own. So Luke, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Oh man. You know, realistically, it's not really my knowledge, right? It's everybody I've learned from. Right. You're totally man, but like all of us, it's a unique synthesis of everyone else's information applied to a very specific context, right? Cause like no one has your experience, No one has your brain. So you're taking all of this information and the ethos and going, boom, I'm going to put this into this specific application. So ultimately, it is yours. Right. I think it should be. Give credit where credit is due. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but nobody has your unique perspective and ability to apply it where you do. I think, man, thank you. I think, you know, realistically, the biggest thing I learned from Charles Poliquin was how to systemize other things. Right. That's that's what he was brilliant at and saying, OK, why does this work? Why does this work? Why does this work? OK, how do I sequence these in the right thing? And I think that's all part of critical thinking and figuring out systems and methods of what to do is taking other people's stuff and then putting into something that makes some sense and clarifies things and filling in gaps and things. And I think when we started MuscleNerds, I wanted to do that for the general population first before I went back into athletic training and things. It's like no one was teaching people how to train normal people. So I said, okay, how do I take everything I've learned from all of these high-level strength coaches, nutritionists, doctors, all that, and how do I water it down and synthesize it for, like, Mary Muffin taught from next door? And so that's kind of what we've done, you know? Yeah. And so the reason I say that is because most people are taking something Paul said in its application for strength training or powerlifting or athletic training and applying it to hypertrophy or applying it to gen pop. And it doesn't apply. You know, there has to be some thought process and some context applied. So your ability to think differently and ultimately take concepts that work in certain contexts and go, well, what about that would make it work over here? What about that? Would it make it not work over here? And how do I, as you say, take all these pieces and make them fit in this specific context? That's the wisdom, man. That's the brilliance. And that's what takes thought rather than just rote memorization. Right. And application is where the rubber meets the road and ultimately how it all fits. Yeah, I think that's that's basically what we teach in all of our courses. We teach this is how you need to be thinking, like stop thinking like everyone else. You need to think about this, like sit there and stare at the wall until a thought comes in your head and then write it down and then see where it fits and then test it. That's the only way you're going to know. Right. Yeah. And that's the first thing I say when people come into my classes is I forget everything you think, you know, my objective is to teach you how to think. Like, don't think you know anything. Just think. Right. And if you can think, you'll start to have new solutions and new processes. And there may or may not be accurate, but the more times you apply them, the deeper your thoughts will go. And rather than being rote, you can just think. I think that's it. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's funny because people are scared to try things that other people say don't work. And it's like, look, if something makes sense, try it. I had a guy the other day, shoulder issue, right? And it just came out of nowhere. And I was looking at the shoulder. We were looking at folks on specific things And I went hold on a second didn you roll your left ankle two weeks ago He goes yeah And I said now your right shoulder hurting He goes yeah I said okay, we did some gluten hip work. And then he tested the shoulder. I know the pain went away. I said, okay. It started, it started on that spiral line from your rolled ankle, probably affected your glute. Now it's affecting your shoulder. I didn't know it was going to work. And when it worked, I started yelling and I was jumping up and down. There was a couple of physiotherapist in the gym that we train and they were like, what just happened? I'm like, I didn't know it was going to work. It worked. Badass. Let's write that down. Yeah, absolutely. Man, I'm a fan. I appreciate your friendship. And where can everyone find more from Luke Lehman and Muscle Nerds? Usual stuff, Facebook, you know, Muscle Nerds, Muscle Nerds underscore health at Instagram, website, musclenerds.net. We've also got our new gym. If you want to see that, it's iopcgym.com.au. Tell me what that stands for again. The Institute of Physical Culture. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Very cool, man. I'd love to get out there. Hopefully I'll get out there and see you soon when the world gets back to some semblance of travel. crazy craziness now all right thanks very much for your time thanks for having me on again and that's a wrap ladies and gents thank you so much for tuning into the muscle intelligence podcast i hope you love this podcast as much as i did i absolutely love sitting down to chat with luke lehman he always brings so much value and insight from the years and years of experience he has both as a teacher and a clinician putting it into practice in the field and getting real time results with people and this is the stuff that matters that the bridge between theory and practice. And a lot of people live on one side of the fence of the other, but very few people are bridging the gap, which is where we live here in muscle intelligence. We live in that bridge. And thank you so much to Luke Lehman. Thank you for being here. I do not take your time lightly. I am so grateful that you're here. 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