Cardio isn't just for weight loss

# Cardio isn't just for weight loss

**Channel:** Nexus Performance Australia
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=82EjgFRQbos

Welcome to the Nexus Unloaded Podcast. This is Will Crozier. And I'm Zach Congonis. We are here to bring you the best solutions to your lifting problems. Through our real-world experience, we hope to break things down in a digestible, applicable, and entertaining way. Just off-shoot to Nexus you've ever seen, just completely off-target. Nexus Reacts. What would you react to? Same. Just music. Me and Alex are into similar music. The difference is like with the channels that I watch, they're like composers. They're smart. And so they're like, oh, I can hear they're in like this chord and they're progressing and blah, blah, blah. And they're actually talking through. And I find that interesting. But then like if I didn't want it to just be, this is fucking sick. It just, yeah. I'll have to just bring the energy because I got nothing else, you know. So, yeah, I don't know how successful that would be. you waiting for the bass to drop on every song it's like yeah just wait just hold on just give it another second there it is anyway yes welcome welcome to podcasting with zach yeah we are today we have yet another guest uh one that if people have been following nexus for a while would know uh and it is the glimmer from muscle nerds hello and he is here to speak with us as at this time a guest presenter in the upcoming nexus mentorship uh on health and and within that a little bit more specifically on blood pressure so we've done a little bit of work um did a video together on it like a short form video so in this time we'll go a little bit more in depth because i feel like blood pressure is something that within performance sports especially powerlifting where it's very very you know very specific it's complete it's so easy to just go like i'll throw that in the bin and yeah and because performance you can just drive so hard until until you're dead yeah you know what i mean in powerlifting so um blood pressure is much more scary once you understand it and i understand it because i did your course and then i i've done your full hypertension course and then i yeah that made me go like god damn i knew this shit was scary but then when you say some of the figures, it's like, holy fuck. Yeah, when you're researching it, you're like, holy shit. I got to tell people about this stuff. And then you're constantly measuring your blood pressure four times a day. That's what I was about to say. You're sitting there like writing it going like, yeah. Oh, God, I'm at 121 over 81. I'm going to die. You're not that bad. Yeah, that's all right. That's much better than the measurements I get back. That's for sure. When I was competing in powerlifting, nobody talked about this. I mean, we're talking 20 something years ago. Yeah. I was 120, 324 kilos. I could barely walk up a flight of stairs without needing a post-workout shake. You know, I would take a shit. My whole face would be purple. And we never took our blood pressure back then. That's probably Zach on an everyday basis, though, because Zach has a lot of digestive issues. It's a struggle. It's a struggle. I can, yeah, I can understand. What's your blood pressure at the moment, Zach? Let's go around and give each other's blood pressure. Right now. We have got one in here. Yeah, we have got one in here. We've both just slammed some caffeine, so I don't know if it's a bit of – I want to get this out. Zach, what's yours? I've got less than no idea. I have not checked my blood pressure in like six months. Oh, there you go. We've got a culprit right here. Exactly. But we do have a cuff right here. We keep it in the gym so everybody that signs up, they don't all do it because they're – Well, they don't care. I'd hate to actually get your readings though. Right now, they would be extreme. Yeah, I don't want to get them. When we first started teaching about that stuff, I was really surprised at how many coaches did not know their client's blood pressure. They're like, we don't take it. It's not in our scope of knowledge. I'm like, hold on a second. It is massively in your scope of knowledge. You don't have to pull out the whole Dr. Garb and a stethoscope and a sphincter, the mama, the bedobbiter, whatever they call it. You've got technologies. Put it on them and hit the button because if you don't do that, how do you know what you're doing? Is that going to be a positive or negative physiological response for them? Yeah, exactly. you don't know which direction to go like where they're at and uh and we'll get into like some of how it affects performance and adaptation as well but i think it's because it's just not a like being healthy isn't sexy like when you're talking to palettes they're all about what's your one rm bro how you know like pulling up lifts videos or like selling performance selling technique like there's many ways to sell powerlifting i think but blood pressure isn't one of them yeah you know uh the health side of it isn't just isn't sexy so i don't think it is like gets talked about and it gets overlooked you know it's a sport of extremes so it's like everyone just just all about extreme strength and just most of the time people are like okay i don care about this how do i squat while i keep my hips together how do i do this without getting a massive injury but they don think about other injuries they could get like long cardiovascular damage And I I often talk about this to people It's like a credit card. You're just, you're racking up this debt that you're going to have to pay off someday. You can be like, yeah, well, you know, I used to deadlift 400 kilos, but now you're 80 and your joints are completely destroyed. You've already had four heart attacks. you know you don't you don't have to trade that you can have good health and you can have good physiology and good blood pressure and you can still be really fucking strong there's sure compound interest on that credit card as well yeah once you once you fall into the data it's real much harder to get out than it is to massively pay it off as it comes yeah um and we'll talk about your model on that the beast mode to least mode least mode to beast mode uh and how that plays into powerlifting because i feel like it directly applies to powerlifting in terms of peaking and being strong and being sympathetic and then trying to reverse that. And we've talked about it in a much less formatted way. Well, one of the things that you always say is that before someone is a powerlifter, they are a human and a person. Yeah, all that kind of language. Yeah, it all comes back into that model and having what I call like an exit plan. Like it's okay to have high blood pressure when you're coming into a comp. I would be almost weirded out if you didn't. Yeah. But, uh, but as long as there's an exit plan, you'd be sweet. As long as there's a plan after to go like, okay, let's fix this shit up. So everything really. And if you're competing in powerlifting and you're about to get on the platform and you're not on the verge and on the borderline of injuring yourself, you're probably not ready. You're probably not going to win. You want to try to stay as healthy as possible until it's time to get on the platform. So it's like when I talk to people about their HRV and about staying, you know balancing out the parasympathetic and the sympathetic you don't want to be parasympathetic when you're stepping on stage you want to be tight you want to be so tight that you have like sausage hands and you can barely turn your neck and that's what you want you don't you want to have to put a certain amount of weight on just to get into the bottom of your squat while you're warming up that was will basically before one of his record breakers comps he looked i called him buffalo billy just looked yeah like a big watermelon when i was trying to push to 125 yeah and zach's been we've all pushed to like tried to push to 125 i don't know any of us have been relatively like a decent holding 125 luke you're probably the most successful out of the three of you boys in what way getting putting the weight on not not in not in the list well let's speak that your let's let's let's do that let's go into like your history first as an athlete because i don't think many people would even know that you did powerlifting and you've been a big part of it was a while ago now and you've pivoted in many ways you're on Zach's wavelength down with the weightlifting. Weightlifting. Not only that, but then if you want to go into yourself as an educator as well and talk about your vast history there. Oh, man. Let's start with the athlete. Where do we start with that? Yeah, I mean, I really don't talk about it much that I powerlifted for a long time. I started when I was 14, and I powerlifted from the age of 14. We had a high school powerlifting team. I started then, and then I did that for four or five years. And then I got away from it for a few years and went into like bodybuilding shit because I wanted to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then I got tired of that. I never competed at that time. I went back in the powerlifting, but that was back when everybody was using all the supportive gears. So people would be wearing like triple denim custom suits, and I hated it. I could not stand it. I refused to lift. I was the dumbass that would buy a new shirt, and I'd put it on at the meet. I had no idea how to fucking wear it. so i never got anything out of it and i got even now people say equipped lifting is stupid i didn't say that well thomas thomas talks about it a little bit and how like if you're doing equipped stuff and he he is competing equipped it definitely puts up a huge barrier to entry for power which i mean one of the main benefits to power thing is it's low barrier entry as in grandma can come into a squad of the comp and this is a blue collar sport yeah you can get in at any level which is great but if you have to put on a squat suit in a bench suit and train in that and have a whole team supporting you and spotting you yeah it takes it levels up that barrier you know trying to stuff you into that suit like a fucking sausage yeah you know but yeah i never i i couldn't i couldn't do it man i couldn't do it i i at my last i did a last not meet but a bench press contest almost broke my elbows because we jacked the shirt too much and the bar wouldn't go all the way down so i lifted my head up and it dropped and the spotters didn't catch it so i got caught in this really fucking weird position. My elbow started and they got it off me and I went, nah, I'm done. Did a proper skull crusher. Proper jam pressed to my hip. How heavy was it? I can tell you in freedom units, it was 475 pounds I think is what it was Is that 200 That close to 200 212 213 No maybe 218 Somewhere around there I don know I don have a calculator I terrible at math I believe him I say 212 That's about right. 500 is 227. So I've got a video on YouTube. I've never shown anybody that where I did the 475, but before that I had dumped it in my lap and then redid it without jacking the shirt so much, but what a sport, but then that like now, like everybody does, most people do raw, you know, or at least just knee wraps. And that, that's what I, when I was 14, that's what we were doing. That was back in like, uh, 1992. And so we didn't like the shirts that you had, maybe you maybe get six or seven kilos out of a bent shirt. And we never wore squat suits. It was just to keep our shoulders from blowing out on a, on a pause. Um, and then when everybody got crazy with it, I was like, I'm done. I'm done. I was thinking I was like 27, 28. I was like, I'll just go back into bodybuilding. And I did that for a while. And now you're down the lifting train. Yeah. Which is out of everything I've done is the most frustrating, hardest one. I would say bodybuild, bodybuilding is the easiest fucking one out of all of them. If somebody says bodybuilding is hard. I don't know. The only hard part is starving yourself. Yeah. I think that is the hard part for sure. Yeah. That's the only hard part. And people tell me, oh, bulking is hard. No, it's not. It's fucking easy to overeat. It's so easy. Stop trying to overeat on potatoes and rice. Powerlifting was hard, but in a different way. Powerlifting was scary hard. When you're walking out 300 something kilos and then, oh fuck, one wrong set. But weightlifting is fucking terrifyingly hard because you're just violently ripping a bar from the floor overhead and if you fuck up you there's no wiggle room to fuck up you can save a shitty squat kind of but you can't save a shitty snatch i think i've seen some videos of no i think i've seen some videos of zach like walking around the gym trying to rescue a snatch definitely yeah like once you once it's in your hands above your head you can kind of walk backwards or forward depending on how much space you have, but if you proper cock it up, it's either coming back on top of you or you're just launching yourself in the other direction. Yeah, I don't see many Olympians walking around the platform with it, so I don't think that's the way it's meant to be. Riddle me this as well. How many bad weightlifters, how many half-decent weightlifters do you see? None. They're either fucking awful or they're fantastic. You don't see an intermediate weightlifter. They don't exist. So where do you guys fit in that category? Awful. I'm still awful. Yeah. at least you're honest about it yeah that's right you get there like getting good at weightlifting takes a long long fucking time especially when you start later yeah and probably the background in powerlifting although it would help from a pure strength perspective probably doesn't help from a like other perspectives like other other qualities it helps from a base strength level yeah but it doesn't help from a technique level because you're squatting a little bit different you know Yeah, that's what I mean. Like you've probably learned different patterns and you probably fall back into them. When I started doing more of the American style, which is deadlift to your chin and just pray that you can get under the bar. That's what we did, right? And like jumping and stomping your feet. Yeah, that was the couple of times I did it when I was younger just for fun. That was the most fun part about it. Just trying to make as much noise. Like bam! I don't know why you feel like you have to do it you feel like a badass when you hear your shoes go crack you're like yeah and then you go I've only got 100 kilos in the bar that's not a whole lot yeah I think I was doing cleans right back at the start of my I would have been 20, 19 maybe I remember just I don't even know why I was jumping I don't even know why I was getting so high well there's no point I think I was yeah and then just I remember just making as much noise as I could We learned from American high school football coaches on rusted asshole bars that weren't designed for this. So I got to a point where I could power clean 150, 160, but I couldn't get under it. So I could full clean like 100, but I could power clean 160, which is not supposed to happen. But that was just kind of like trying to deadlift the bar to my chin and then racking it. Would you compete now or are you just doing it as a hobby sort of training direction? That's a very good question. And I have a very good answer. I would do it at like club stuff, but because I have taken performance enhancing drugs in the past, I wouldn't feel good about getting, you know, even in a, a tested meet, even though I could pass, I still feel like I have an advantage from years of powerlifting and doing is there novice comps and things like that? The way that powerlifting has a lot of novice meets. That's, I don't know, to be honest. Like sometimes Like there a gym down in Melbourne the gym called Control Chaos but they run like unsanctioned meats so there not only novice comps but there non comps yeah that that what yeah that what a novice is get brandon into it tell him he's tell his gym to start hosting some novice comps and then we'll fly luke down awful lifters maybe like welcome maybe two more years we compete you compete the win right i don't i wouldn't i would never compete in something i I didn't expect at least place. Yeah, but Mickey, don't forget as well, in powerlifting, you can change your openers. But in weightlifting, once you put in the attempts you're starting with, you can't change them. Like, you can't go down. Right. So you, like, lock yourself in. And if you're having a bad day, you're cocked. Sounds like a very complicated sport. It's like the rise of the bar. Not really. I don't think so. Well, it's very technical. It takes you two years just to get on the platform. It's very technical. Yeah, but the sport itself, I mean, it's like powerlifting but two lifts. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But it's just the timeline to get into that. I don't know if I'd have the patience for that. Well, that's why they all start when they're fucking 10 or less. Or they steal them from their village. I say, from a timeline perspective, you could become a decent powerlifter far before you could become even an average weightlifter. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is much more technical. Because Zach started going down the dunk route as well. Is that a skill that you were trying to help carry over into your Are they lifting Zach? No, I just thought it'd be fucking sick. Are we talking about dunking donuts or dunking like basketballs? That's funny. Cause that's kind of part of why I wanted to do weightlifting too. I've always been able to get like the palm touching, but I've never been able to fully dunk. And then I realized that it would help. We just figured it out. We just figured out all weightlifters true motivation. Just want to dunk. But then you realize like doing trap bar jumps are probably a faster route to it, but it's not as fun as doing snatches and cleans. Have you ever dunked a ball before? I've dunked a little ball, but not an actual basketball. Okay. Well, it's a race for you guys. Dunking, I guess. Fuck weightlifting, we're dunking. Are you still actually dunking, Zach? I mean, after I blew out the ankle. It's coming back. I can like land again, which is nice. Okay. I challenged him to a sprint off a couple of weeks ago. So we can fuck the ankle harder. Yeah, we'll fuck the ankle up and delay the dunking. I like it. Yeah, I like it. Just like you said earlier, control chaos. Yeah. So let's go back into the health performance thing. And we briefly mentioned it there. But do you want to give us like a little bit of more of a rundown as to how health directly and indirectly affects performance? because I feel like when people measure their blood pressure and it's high, they're like, eh, but I can squat heavy. You know what I mean? As in like acutely, it might not matter. Like we talked about at comps, everyone's fucking almost there. But long-term, over say 10 years, how it can be a severe like impact on your performance. One of the best quotes I've ever heard was Broderick Chavez. And I was at a seminar a few years ago that he was here. And he, somebody said, I think it was Dean was like, do your cardio rant, do your cardio rant. And at that time, everybody's calling me like the cardio guy. I'm like, I'm not the cardio guy. I'm just saying, stop avoiding cardio. It's not going to ruin your game. It's going to actually make you stronger and help you train harder. And I'm, I'm in the back going, Oh fuck. You don't want to get down Broderick's radar. But then he got up and started telling everybody you need to do your fucking cardio and start stop calling it cardio. call it what it is cardiovascular respiratory training because it loses the language is important and he was like you know what's really bad for performance dying dying is really terrible for performance and i went that's fucking brilliant yeah right so um and i mean obviously that's the extreme to it and he deals with mostly extreme very very like the most extreme of the extreme but he's got a really good point it's like if you're going to compete you're doing these things that a lifting weights, it's not natural to our bodies. Like we're not designed to do it. We can do it. And some people are really good at it and better than most everybody else in the world, but it's still an artificial thing. We're not really designed to do. We're designed to run and jump and swim and climb and things like that. We lift weights because it's fucking awesome. It's bad-ass to be big and jacked and as bad-ass to put heavy ass weight over your head and impress people because not that many people can do it for the same reason. Getting abs is really cool. Why? Why is that the thing for guys? Guys at some point always want abs because you got to earn them. You got to earn a 400 kilo squat. You got to earn a 200 kilo squat. You can't, you can't just walk in on the streets, do that. You got to work for it. All right. Same thing with abs, same thing with anything else you get. But you also have to concede that what we're doing here is not the greatest thing for our joints.

the pursuit of maximal strength. I think most powerlifters are somewhat aware of that. I've had people go to me, usually people not even involved in sport, like elderly people and that, and they'll try to make themselves feel better and go like, you're not going to be able to walk or your knees are going to be so sore when you're older. And I'm like, yeah, but when I'm 70, things aren't, I don't know, in my opinion, even if I sat on my ass my whole life, it's going to be just as fucking bad. I'm going to be old. that not using, it's going to do the same thing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you're kind of, so it's like you've had extreme unuse or extreme high use and somewhere in the middle is probably the best thing for it. So it's like, if we're going to do these things that we know have the potential to be deleterious, if we take them too far, which is what we do with performance, we need to do things to kind of reverse that. Right. So it's like you get the guys who love lifting weights and i think like the movement guys the guys who are doing fucking break dancing and the handstand shit that's probably the most natural thing but they're all fucking weak as shit right so it's like you talk to powerlifters are like yeah they can wipe their own ass but they can't squat 400 kilos and you're like cool but they can move and they feel good right but then you see most guys you talk to in powerlifting at least if they were have been at a high level at point they're like yeah my back's real fucking stiff when i get up every time they stand up like oh fuck i mean i'm not even strong anymore and i stand up from 10 hours at my desk i'm like fuck my back shit i gotta do these fucking drills and mcgill bullshit on the floor to get my back even feeling okay to walk to the kitchen um the same thing with like joints blood pressure all this stuff has to be managed somehow and so it doesn't help to put your head in the sand and act like an ostrich and just forget about it. It's going to catch up to you if you don't do something about it at some point. But then you have, you know, half the industry saying, Oh, you don't need to do any of this stuff. It's going to fuck up your lifts. You're going to not be as strong as you cardio. That's bullshit. You know, if you do this, the other, that's going to fuck realist. That's a lot of us. It's all the dose makes the poison. And if your dose is pushed too far into one area and you're not catering to the other stuff, you're going to lose that, that stuff. And you're going to end up lopsided in one area. So you have to learn how to divvy out your investment in different multiple baskets so that you reap the rewards of each of it. So it's like when I tell somebody to do cardio to get their blood pressure down, they go, well, it's going to make me weaker. I'm not asking you to run a marathon. I'm asking you to do like 20 or 30 minutes of like, just get on a fucking treadmill and incline walk. Is that hard? Well, that's really tiring. Then you're really fucked. You actually need to do it now. Yeah. Yeah. To extend on that point as well, a lot of people, once they do cross that precipice of, okay, I'm kind of fucked now, they feel like the solution is I'll just stop. And then they believe that stopping the thing that's pushing them forward will pull them back. But it kind of just stops where it is that it just stays there and or gets worse because they ain't doing nothing. It's not a solution to just stop having the input. You need something to pull the input back to where you kind of came from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you were asked with the lease mode to beast mode stuff, because this has evolved over time, and it's gotten mis... I don't know if it's miscommunicated or misinterpreted, but it's like people look at lease mode meaning you train like a pussy. That's not what that means. Zach has another suggestion at the end. We could just look at it now. Cuck mode to fuck mode. What is it? Cuck mode to fuck mode. Oh, I like that. Someone who likes watching their missus get pounded while they're in the same room. I would say put that on shirts, but my wife would be so mad. She'd be like, that's not good for muscle nerds. But you can make it on your own shirts. Cause I mean, like just behind the back, just like selling merch at the back of the car boot sale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you go to a seminar and then she's out the front and then you're at the back dealing shirts. Cause she sees it on Instagram. Like where'd these come from? I don't know. One of our students must've made that. Blame Zach for it. Yeah. if you don't take it we're gonna steal it but where the fuck were we explaining the continuum but it's like just to give you a background of where the whole terminology came from is a friend of mine Zach Trowbridge from the States we were sending each other these videos where these guys are like oh beast mode and they were training like absolute pussies I'm like so I'm like this isn't beast mode? He goes, yeah, it sounds more like least mode. And I went, I'm going to write that down. So I wrote it down. And later I started thinking about where that could fit in with something. And I went, alright, if everybody thinks they training like beasts and we see people with higher blood pressure a high resting heart rate fucked up sleep fucked up joints Maybe what they do need to do is some more least mode which now we need to define what that is And part of that is just maybe altering the amount of intensity or the amount of total volume you getting So maybe doing least effective dose of everything. Like what's the, even like Mike Isertel talking about minimal effective volume or maximum recovery volume. If we go, okay, what is maximal beast volume and what's the minimal least volume that I need to actually keep progressing? But then I can also put my eggs in different baskets to get better. And then when I go back to beast mode, everything feels better. I've recovered and now I've hit PRs. and so lately what I've looked at too doing the weight lifting I kind of went from that American style and said well who has the most medalists in the world the Chinese so I went to a Chinese coach and I had a Chinese coach start writing my programming just because I wanted to see how they did it and what the difference in the way they lifted was and why it's so economical and so efficient one of the things i found was they do a lot of submaximal work like they do a ton of work but it's a lot of sets not that many reps in stupidly low volume and so we started to integrate some of that in which is like okay instead of going in and hitting like a three by three why don't you just do a ten by three and do it at like somewhere around like 60 to 70 percent and just use the volume to create the stimulus so you take the pressure off the joint so you take the pressure off the heart take pressure off the circulatory system we find that works really well it's just hard to get people to understand that you don't have to lift at like one two three rep maximums to progress and you you don't have to do a ton of stimulatory reps for that to happen you can overcome that if you give it enough volume and focus on your technique yeah yeah and i find so the hard thing with that like in that uh we we talk about is like uh i don't know what what kind of percentage you're talking about for 10 by 3 like 60 70 somewhere in there yeah but that kind of yeah like like four or five reps from failure something like that don't forget as well the percentages are a bit fucked up with weightlifting yeah yeah i'm talking more power to you but yeah because well part of it too is because weightlifting is faster your main vector is acceleration yeah the weight so then you have to kind of you start thinking we could throw about a bunch of stuff like looking at like uh velocity based training and things like that and saying okay well i'm going to focus if i'm if i'm a power lifter i don't want to relate to that i need to focus on moving the bar as fast as possible out of the hole right so then you get a push push band or you get a what's the new and i got the flex device you saw me using that in here that one time and start using that as training loads and saying well i'm gonna instead of using mass as my main vector i'm gonna use acceleration and try to equalize those two so that i take some of the stimulus off the joint stimulus off the heart and then just drive that into actually accelerating the bar and focusing on more technique based stuff for a while yeah because with our approach um with the palatine side obviously completely different we're not a speed sport yeah it's not a when i talk about skill with the power lifts usually i'm talking high end because getting under one arm is very different from getting under 60 but that yeah it might be an almost complete i would always categorize them different lifts like if they're the same fundamentals but there's no way you can challenge it in the same way it's definitely a skill to lift really heavy and uh my argument was always kind of like it's just not the same like it's not it's just not the same thing just like you and i have had talks about certain treatment modalities and and things you would do to make yourself feel better when you're not training but you can't do that when you put 300 kilos in your back it all kind of goes out the window yeah yeah right um but when we look at yeah well there's other attributes how do you how do you marry these two things up together right so it's like how many say how many total high-end work sets are you going to get in the workout like what's what's the normal that people would get just of the skill list of sbd usually just a few you know yeah so three top end sets or so yeah yeah if you're doing well so would you agree that i'd say not more than five yeah and you've got to look at that between what would a beginner do versus someone say at your level yeah yeah that's totally different right yeah because like obviously if they're heavy even if it is relatively easy for you if it's still heavy like it's going to accumulate a bit more fatigue and then once you get to a certain point of fatigue everyone's a little bit different but get to a point where you're a little bit and then you're not getting any more skill out of it just because you're like you're yeah 100 but if we look at something like you say somebody has rampant blood pressure what going to happen if they keep hitting 3x3 at say an 85 yeah yeah yeah you see so it like you might think well is it going to be conducive to try to push through it and just pray that my heart my blood pressure and heart rate goes down or what if I put two to three weeks of this in and I just say well I'll just do nine sets of three at say 75 instead of three by three at 85 let let my cardiovascular system catch up and then jump back in and see what happens because three four weeks is that going to make is that going to make anyone's max go down or their skill deteriorate no no i was also thinking a much longer period than that for sure in a lot of cases they do need longer periods depends on how bad you get it but if you if someone just kept marching forward and didn't insert those kind of least mode weeks as we'll call it or those least mode phases you could you could conceivably have um periods where you said okay i'm going to start let's say how long your cycle is going to be. Maybe you're doing 16, 20 weeks of a prep. And you're like, okay, I get in six weeks and all of a sudden I see my blood pressure changing, but it's not bad. But then by week eight, man, my blood pressure getting real fucked up and I'm feeling tired and I don't feel like I'm training. My joints starting to hurt. My heart rate's going, my sleep's all fucked up. I've got digestive issues or whatnot. I love the point. I do appreciate it, but it's like, is it going to derail you that much to say, let me just take two weeks and just work on skill development and just do a show. Yeah. And let everything try to catch up. There's a deload to people and they would understand that. Yeah. And that maybe that's the semantics we need to use is it, well, we're going to use a deload so that they don't think it's some type of pussy week time to slack off. Cuck week. Yeah. Cuck week. I reckon that's going to take off after this. For sure. Alternating periodization, cuck phase, fuck phase. buy my book yeah we've done similar like we've for us it was more uh like it's very similar the same overarching principles and and thought action just slightly different way of programming it is like um uh minimum effective dose of skill in an off season or during a restoration phase or whatever you want to call it with a lot more variation for joints and for all the rest of benefits that come with it um and inherently a lot less usually like a lot less weight yeah comes with that uh and usually we're using constraints like uh barb the front scores i don't know whatever it is to like limit that further uh and the volume dosing is much more in that way just like pure minimum and then lots of other stuff and then obviously like in a prep it'll be flipped it'll be like maximal recoverable sbd skill work stuff that's going to actually drive this forward and and then enough of just a small dosage of that other stuff to kind of keep you feeling all right. Yeah, 100%. I think, too, like, now that velocity-based training, like over the last, like, six or seven years, it's gotten more and more popular. More accessible, I think. Yeah, it's cheaper. Definitely cheaper. You don't have to pay three grand for a gym-aware or tendo unit now. You can – I've got that – I think it was, like, $500 for the whole package for that flex device. The disco. The disco ball, yeah, with the lasers. right that's that's a good i mean to me that's a good way of like really individualizing how much weight you need on the bar and how much weight you need that day as long as you stay in the parameter how fast the bar needs to go and what we know about bench squat and deadlift still being a stimulus for like high level maximal strength yeah i've always thought about that I haven't played with it at all. So I absolutely know validity with these statements, but before somebody comes at me, people, when they get into VBT, people get really, they get really weird. Like it's super, like this is the way man. Yeah. But anyway, I've always thought it like, it'd be a really good way for getting instant feedback on somebody's fatigue or recovery. Like they're moving it away, away to a certain way less this week. Like that would be really good instant feedback as opposed to waiting for, the more lagging metrics like for them to tell you hey i'm feeling a bit shit yeah i think you get instantaneous this is going to be a good workout or this workout needs to be yeah tailored a little bit different today you know because you might go in like let's say i haven't been using it a lot lately but let's say last week same session i go in and i hit five reps and the average is 0.58 meters per second or whatever. I come in today and I do one rep and I'm like, that average is way off. Then maybe I need to take the weight down and then maintain the speed. Right, so you can manipulate variables like that, which are really good. It's to get some sort of stimulus. To make sure you're still getting at least an equal type of stimulus without overdoing the stimulus or overdoing the exposure to the stimulus Yeah fair Yeah I was thinking more of like a cap tool like hey if you start to get real shitty pull it back yeah and then combining that with rpe or some sort of subjective measure as well to help kind of i i don't i don't like rps why not i don't like rps or reps and reserve you don't like you trust people what's the what's the thing hey i don't trust people to know where they're at that's one thing i think the bar speed is the bar speed so as long as your device is good the bar speed and you're pushing as hard as you can the bar speed is more constant yeah so there's definitely it's it's obviously it's an objective measure you can't it yeah um unless you're trying to be slow i guess but um i don't want to train hard today oh that's heavy yeah yeah exactly yeah but we've always found with rpe that the subjectivity of it is super useful in telling me hey like i'm feeling you know what i mean like some i don't know some people can some people are just beasts and can yeah push through things i guess i don't know i haven't played with it but um i've always thought having a subjective measure in there alongside an objective measure whether it is a set load percentage a range or in that case something like that was always what about good tackling like a merging of the so we'll take it we'll take a device out of the equation right because not everybody's going to have access to device but bar speed is subjectively and slightly objectively measurable from the eye yeah from the way it feels today yeah so what i tend to tell my clients i'll tell them how many slower reps i want them to get to like yeah okay when you feel one rep start to slow down that's it because to me you're probably gonna that's probably three or or four reps in reserve yep if you have one one one point two five or one and a half seconds you feel you that rep doesn't feel the same as the other ones yeah you might have three or four in there depends on how good your technique is when you get tired or we might take them to the point where you get like one slow shit rep and once your technique breaks down we stop you know what i've been doing a little bit more lately as well is um almost like an old you would have read john Meadows programs and books back when he, you know how he never, he had RP, I think in there and he had like a percentage in there as well, but he used to do things in a way that I thought was always so fucking cool, but time consuming, which was like write a full description of what the set should look like. So he'd write like, I want you to fucking die on the last set. Like I want you to be crawling off the machine or whatever, or on contrary, like I want this to be like a smooth, clean rep. Like as soon as you feel like you're breaking down or anything like a slow rep or whatever, let's let's pull it back or whatever you know like the the intent was conveyed through like a descriptive manner and i've started doing that a lot more lately with people who who are a little bit shitter with judging rpe because the intent is really what i want from it if it's a skill exercise if it's a pause squat that i'm trying to teach you how to get better at a squat it's like uh i want it to be clean i don't want you to fucking grind out a pause squat or whatever like there's no point that if it's a leg extension i want you to yeah i want you'd be hardly able to walk after it. Yeah. You know, so like I always loved his thing as well. So, so many ways to – we've gotten so far off track here. Yeah, we're totally off track. Sorry. Sorry. That was most fun to begin with. That's the podcast though. That's what we do. Yeah, there's so many ways to prescribe like an intensity or like what you want behind – describe the intent behind what you're from the set, objective and subjective. And I always find it so interesting this, you know, people – it obviously – or they all work. Yeah. I do a lot of descriptions like that. And that's where I got it from is John Meadows. I got it. He's the king. Yeah. But I only do that. Like if there's like very specific instructions on how I want stuff done. Yeah. So, cause man, if you did that on every exercise, not unless the templates like him. Yeah. Yeah. But if I know somebody is a little bit, I know that they like to push the, the numbers a little bit, then, um, stuff like that I find can convey a message much easier. Most of the people that I still actively coach, I still coach about two dozen people online and they're almost exclusively other coaches and you never know what you're going to get. You'll either get the fucking cowboy who you can see that a squat's going completely sideways and he's still trying to hold that shit together and you got to try to tell him how to dial it back. I'll tell you what, most coaches, and if you're one of my clients or one of the coaches listening to this, they're pussies, man. They don't train hard at all. Like my clients have learned to train hard, but when I first get another personal trainer or a coach, they don't train hard. Their last rep looks identical to the first rep. And I'm like, you just did 12 reps. They all look identical. You should have at least two reps in there that start to look a little different. Like you're not even sweating at the end of your workout. This is why you're not, your body's not changing. These are good descriptions. Put them in the program. You should be dying. You should be sweating at the end of this session. I want you to have a slight bit of anal prolapse at the end of this leg extension.

I love how our conversations always go down these sort of routes. I would like to see a full hemorrhoid by the end of this training week. I don't care on which exercise, but I want some intestines coming out. Yeah. My insurance does not cover this, however. Sign the waiver. You can still push amiprolase back out. Hemorrhoid too. You can still kind of shove that in maybe. Jesus Christ. That's extra though. That's some real descriptive shit. That's extra. Don't want to put that in the program. Zach, do you want to try and get us back on track? Where the fuck were we? I mean, we were on the continuum of beast mode. The amount that we discussed blood pressure, the next thing we had in it was just out of all the markers, you mentioned HIV, you mentioned blood pressure. Which of them is the most telling for how far into beast mode someone is? I feel like you've answered the question already, but which is the most telling? Well, you've got to look at it from a couple of different perspectives. which ones are things that I like to look at things, what can be taken every day with minimal effort and what needs to be done sporadically. Like if you have trackable tech, which most of my clients wear, right. Um, I can get resting heart rate, peak heart rate, performance, heart rate. If they wear it when they sleep, I can get a long-term HRV after a few weeks. Um, and then blood pressure as long as they have a blood pressure cuff. It's like the two easiest, the number one easiest thing is going to be heart rate because if you have a cell phone or smartphone, you can take your heart rate with your finger. If you have trackable tech, you can do that. If you've got trackable tech, you can usually get a good HRV reading. If someone has higher blood pressure, I'd like them to get a blood pressure cuff, like spend the a hundred bucks and get a really nice blood pressure cuff from the chemist. These ones are super cheap. It has the cord, but you can get the non-corded ones, the wrist ones for big people even. You've got the Omron arm cuff one. the HEM 7500, the black one. Yeah. I'm a technology guy. Yeah. But yeah, that one's easy. But you'll see some things are modifiable faster than others. So things go negative faster than others and some things go positive. So if you're tracking HRV, HRV is a really good one that will immediately change quickly. That's probably your fastest one to change, especially if it's in a negative manner. So you could have great HRV, have one shitty night's sleep or have a few drinks before you go to bed and your HRV crashes. And it's important to then have clients understand what your number looks like and how you feel the next day, because everyone has their own personal HRV reading. And that has to do with your genetics, your age, what you're doing, how fit you are, how unfit you are. So you, you've got, you have to find a good range of HRV for somebody and say, okay, is that range age appropriate? Let's look at the data. Okay. Is that modifiable? If you can, let's try to work on getting that range at least a little bit higher and try to get it in as healthy a position as possible, depending on what your demand is. Like if you're, if you're a world champion powerlifter, your HRV is never going to be like a fucking marathon runner. Like it's never going to be that high. So you can't use that. Or if you're, you know, 250 pounds and you squat 400 kilos. I don't know why I'm using freedom units and metric, but you have to be reasonable with what you're trying to do with life. So for gen pop, I always say gen pop can't get aerobic enough. If they're not competing and they're not in a strength sport and they don't care about that, they need to be strong enough for what they want to do. They need to be mobile enough and they need to be pain-free enough and they can probably never get aerobic enough because out of every piece of literature, high VO2 max has been shown to be the number one thing that lower all cause mortality and give you a long life where you're probably not going to be crippled if you don't get in a really bad accident. And that's all going to be based on maximal heart rate and average heart rate and resting heart rate. Yeah. But the heart rate will is pretty transient too. So if you have HIV and heart rate, which they're both associated with each other, you can get a pretty good picture where somebody is. And if you can combine that blood pressure that's even better yeah love that yeah they're all like you said pretty easy to measure and they're all well researched yeah it's not like people are just pulling numbers out of their ass there's a lot of data on heart rate and i think some of the if you if you ask me to pinpoint the best resting heart rate for people i think you would be real surprised at what the literature says um based on longevity and and mortality i you'd be able you'd know but i remember in your, your hypertension course. Like it's like, I think most people would go like, oh yeah, I'll do a hypertension course, get through that easy in a few hours or whatever But you want to remember the amount of data and the amount of advice like the length of the course was huge i forget what it was but it was massive and then it um there's a lot more into it than what uh what people would expect yeah because you've got to talk about i mean you got to talk about the data you got to talk about why it's important how to measure it and all that stuff didn't okay how do we modify it because you have to have practical applicable things to do so um what's your approach if somebody just It doesn't give a fuck. As in, like, I'm a powerlifter. I squat 400. And then you come up and you're like, you're also, you know, looking by this, like, you're also fucking going to die in 20 years. Some people in powerlifting and in strength sports who are pushing the extreme and are at the top of their game and do feel like they're above everyone else will be like, they'll either, like, put their head in the sand or just not give a fuck at all. Or they'll just, like, completely, like, play naive. Like, how do you get that person? what's your strategy to get that person out to give a fuck do you talk about performance like how do you how do you get that i mean well you just don't care i don't give a fuck i'm not their parent like i mean look you either want to get your shit together you don't and if you're happy like being the gym hero in your 20s and 30s and you don't care if it fucks you up in your 60s just come back around so i can say i told you so like that's all i'm gonna i had a friend that i he totaled elite in three different weight classes and he was going for his fourth and i mean that's crazy that's insane and i told him i think we were in our late 20s and i go you're gonna die in your mid-30s he goes at least i'll die in a big box with lots of trophies i'm like okay cool no one gives a no one cares like yeah except you and your mom and like and it wasn't even his job he was like a tradie so it's not like he was using that as a platform for marketing gyms training he didn't train anybody so like it was just a personal pride and he was like had this big spartan 300 mentality and didn't give a you can't help someone that doesn't want to be helped themselves at the end of the day like i always say and this is kind of off topic a little bit but when someone comes on board when with my nutrition side um i the first thing i say to them is like we'll work together if you have a willingness to make change if you don't have a willingness to make change and and the desire to do that then you got to go find someone else that's willing to take your money and waste waste their time because i'm so glad you say i say the same like most of my clients they pay for nutrition they pay for training they pay for all this stuff i don't manage a lot of people's nutrition because they won't do it yeah so they'll go in and train they'll log everything they'll send me their videos so 90 of what i'm doing every day is watching videos correcting and programming because they won't address the nutrition and then they'll ask me four or five weeks later should we change our macros i'm like well maybe you should do the macros you were had the last four or five weeks that way we see where you go and then we'll see if we need to change anything at that point they're like oh people like the idea of it but they're not willing to do the work it's funny they want they want you to constantly change when they haven't done the first thing you told them to do like it's the same thing with like going back to the the hypertension side of it as well like they like the idea of not having purple skin and feeling relatively good but they're not willing to do the you know two to three 20 minute low impact sort of exercises to get them at least progressing and on that trajectory of of restoring health how many times you tell somebody to get a blood pressure cuff and they're like i can't afford it i'm like well you can afford a gram of tren a week when you need about a quarter of that this is less than 100 bucks so i mean it's like you can afford you can afford thousands of dollars worth of gear you know why in and a new new weightlifting wraps and all kinds of why can't you just go out and spend all your money on pizzas and burgers and things like that over the course of a week or a month and it adds up pretty quick as well you can see how people fall into this right like you can see how people like don't give a or like they they turn the blinkers on or whatever it is because they are doing well at their sport and that's what matters to them at the time. Like, I don't think I blame anybody for it. Cause like, I can see that. It's like your life. If that's like the main thing that you've achieved in life and like the thing people look up to you for, it's really, I can, I can see that mentality where you're like, this is more important to me right now. And you're like, lean into it. So I get it. I think too, I think it's a lot of misinformation too. because if you think about it like power lifting probably the most popular now as i've seen it yeah in any at any time like i started again i started when i was in high school that was a common texas high school thing right if you go to the midwest you go to the northeast still wrestling we're all power lifting and we're really good at it and so where do you learn powerlifting these old bros from the 60s and 70s so you go in a powerlifting gym and you learning from guys that were really good in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and they still say well if you do any cardio it going to make you weaker So they like let do now you you walk 3 steps a day That too many steps You need to get that down to 2,500 steps. And they're like, oh, the way you can't, you can't get the way you get big, you got a massively stuffed food in your face. I'm like, you don't, you're eating way more food than you actually need. Like you need enough food to grow more food on top of that. Isn't necessarily going to make you better, but what it will do is drive inflammation and drive blood pressure and drive blood sugar and drive a lot of other shit that's going to fuck you up in the longterm. So there's a lot of guys passing information that we now know is not correct, but they still hold onto that. So they get scared to make that change because if, if you were, you know, if you were squatting 400 kilos and I told you, look, you really need to do a little cardio to get your blood pressure down. What if that takes 10 kilos off my squat? Now I'm no longer one of the strongest guys in the world you know it might do in the short term but that's why you're always going to be looking big picture yeah right in in 12 to 18 months or whatever you could be squatting 410 kilos because now your work capacity and your ability to recover and blah blah blah has now significantly improved and powerlifting is not a short-term sport like there's no we'll set it there's no shortcuts you know like you have to even the shortcuts are not as shortcutty as you think like even even going taking a grammar training yeah it feels like a shortcut right now but it is is long term it only does so much yeah there's still a lot of things you got to take care of yeah exactly exactly yeah yeah um one thing i wanted to i mentioned earlier that when i was doing your hypertension course and stuff that there are some pretty like scary facts yeah like not even for powerlifters for anybody you're like if you you know blood pressure is a thing and you've seen the ad silent killer blah blah blah um but until until you know some of these numbers like uh you just don't know like you're not aware like i know there's many of them uh but like what's your like scariest like what do you think's like the number that the most people should be aware of because like i can think of a couple um yeah is there any big i think big hitters that hit people the thing i think that's the scariest out of all of it is that it is a silent killer. Like you could have all these issues. And if you're not measuring anything, you have no idea. You can just fucking drop dead one day. I think that's a, that's a very scary thing because again, a lot of people don't put their head in the sand and they won't think about it. Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Dr. David Jockers And then you take the blood pressure. I had a guy at one of our courses, his blood pressure was two 10 over a hundred. Dr. Tim Jackson And it looked relatively healthy or Dr. Justin Marchegiani Um, Dr. Tim Jackson You could see the sign Dr. Tim Jackson I could see it, but most people would, he was getting ready. I think he eventually want like he want a really huge european like mr universe thing right so he looked about as what you would want somebody to look like at that level of bodybuilding and a lot of people that didn't couldn't recognize looking at his skin and looking at like the color of his skin and the quality of his skin and the way he was breathing they would just look at and be like man he's a beast at one point i've seen this guy squat 140 140 there's a video on it online 140 145 kilos back squat for 42 reps in a row. Yeah, so he's not unfit in an endurance way? In a strength-specific performance way, no. But he's like passing out in the middle of class. It's like 11 in the morning and he's like passed out in the back of class. I'm like, I'm not that fucking boring. Jesus. Yeah. And he's sleeping all day. I would definitely say that you're one of my favorite presenters, to be honest, as well. Thank you. I think there are a couple as well of facts. like uh if your blood pressure is i know about 150 over 100 and you're at 30 35 35 then your life expectancy was like 67 years old or something yeah yeah that's pretty scary yeah like i think most guys they heard that and then they went and checked their blood pressure and if it was around that number you'd be like i don't feel unhealthy you know what i mean like it's it's pretty rough but i don't want to be all doom and gloom so like let's talk quickly about the opposite direction so if you apply it the least mode if you go like i've heard you i've been i've been a beast for too long i've been a for too long and i really really want to get some talk about you much you've been a boy for too long man yeah i really want to leave that life then uh then then uh you know and i i go and apply all of your methodology uh all the nutrition all the or the cardio all the lifting all these different metrics how how quickly and like all all the long-term you're going to die in 20 years type stuff. Like how much of that can I reverse? Like it depends. It's probably the it's quick, but it also depends on where in your life and how far you've let it go. Like if you're, if you listening to this and you 28 and you competing and you like okay I gonna go take my blood pressure Your blood is like one 55 over say 95 Okay great You you at least you 28 Like you can you can get this down really quickly If you're, you know, 68, we've got another, other different conversation we have to have. Right. But, um, most of the time, and you have to understand that some of this stuff is chemical in nature. Some of us mechanical in nature, right? So the chemical stuff is easy to take care of really quickly. I can, work on stress management techniques. I can start getting a little bit more aerobically fit, try to get more sleep. That's the big one that people want to avoid. They don't sleep enough. That's probably the biggest thing that will change your health metrics, especially blood pressure and heart rate and HRV is sleep guys out there. Yeah. Where, where your CPAP machine, that's big one. Um, but like a lot of it too, is people talk about quality of sleep, but then they only lay in bed for five or six hours. It's like, even if you're not sleeping with high quality, stay in bed longer. Like if you have to, if you have to try to be unconscious for 10 hours to get six or seven hours of good quality sleep, do it. Yeah. Right. Um, and if you're bad at sleeping practice, practice sleeping, just like you would your squat, you know, um, three sets, but that the sleeping is the big one. But if you take care of a lot of this stuff, the, the chemical side, when, but you're looking at things like adrenaline and noradrenaline, that can be dropped really quickly because a lot of that is just as much mental, emotional and mental and psychological as it is actual physical. So if you were to dial down your training a little bit and then try to get more sleep and then try to change your perception of how you or how you react, try to become non-reactive to stressful events, which is another skill you have to work on. you can drop heart rate blood pressure in three or four weeks like it's nothing the problem is a lot of people think they're out of the woods at that point that's what i was going to say yeah but but we have to change the morphology the heart as well and what i what i teach in the course is like with power lifters you're doing a lot of um you're doing a lot of efforts where you're having to brace so you resolve a maneuver you're bracing you're creating a lot of of internal vascular pressure, which then the heart has to try to counteract. So you start damaging the phthalate lining. You start getting hardening of the arteries. The arteries get really stiff. The heart has to then grow and get more muscular in order to perfuse blood properly. So now your blood pressure is rising. So you have very non-pliable vascular system. So your body goes, well, I'll just make a bigger pump. So the musculature of the heart gets a lot thicker. And now one of the problems, like this is a good compensation. The body is very good at compensating. It's very good at like trying to work around dumb shit we do to ourselves, but it does have its limits. So as the, as your heart gets thicker, the chamber that's holding the blood doesn't expand. And in a lot of cases it gets smaller. So now the heart has to beat more rapidly in order to keep blood pushing. So now you have high heart rate. Now you have high blood pressure. And now, yeah, now you get a non-variable. heart rate as well. So you lose heart rate variability and now you're bathing in adrenaline and bathing in adrenaline and try to keep your heart pumping, pumping, pumping, and everything just gets worse. And you start placking and eventually you have a heart attack or your stroke or an embolism or something like that. So if you start taking action, then in a few weeks, if the Mercury is in retrograde and the moon and the stars align, a lot of your like blood pressure stuff will drop a little bit, but you have to keep working on it. I reckon within the first three to five weeks, most people should see a pretty big improvement, but it's going to take probably 12 to 16 weeks to solidify that because we have to change the structure of the heart and what the heart's doing. We have to open that internal cavity a little bit more, which means you have to do stuff where you're constantly pushing blood in there, which is cardio. Which still isn't, I mean, to me, like that doesn't seem like a really long time. No. That's not, if you turn around and said, it's going to take three, four years for you to really make any sort of change most people be like really fuck i don't know if i could be fucked yeah but you know 12 16 weeks that's a prep and most people can deal with their joints hurting and their lives sucking uh for the for the sake of a prep and to hit big numbers so um yeah and we only recommend a comp usually usually once to you know two to three times max per year anyway just because there's other shit to work on that's the thing you come off the platform you're already probably like your joints hurt, you're sick, sick and tired of lifting heavy. Everyone's actually looking forward to doing things like that is what we see most often. So you've got to utilize that. That's the perfect time. Just spend a couple of four-week blocks working on stuff you don't normally work on. Work on your split squats. Work on length and position stuff. Work on lower loading, lower intensity.

intensity loading. Do some cardio. Start looking at your diet. Say, I know everybody goes, oh, you got to eat more salt. Man, I've never seen somebody with a salt deficiency. That book, Salt Fix, has fucked every personal trainer's idea of salt. You ever seen a salt deficiency in anyone? No. I see a lot of potassium deficiencies because people won't eat plucking plants. But a lot of, especially in powerlifting, what's a really good bulking food for powerlifters? Maccas. Maccas and pizza. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's like, can I get my post-workout fix? Yeah. Especially in, especially in the bigger weight classes where it's like, well, I can just bloat the fuck up, turn myself into a big fucking water sausage. Yeah. You know? So at that point it's probably a good idea to maybe cut weight a little bit, do a little bit of cardio for part of that, get some sweat going on, get some healthier foods back in, um, and then give, give everything a break and see if like a good eight weeks gets all that stuff realigned. And then you can start slowly turning the amplitude of your training back up. The amount of conversations that we've had following the recent pro-role comp that Will's been at from our own clients that it's like, man, I just feel so much better. Like my sleep's the best that it's ever been. And this is the best that it's ever been. And it's okay that recognizing for that short period of time during a comp prep, those things are probably, those qualities are probably going to degrade ever so slightly but it's about knowing that they are short term it's not permanent um and that those are the first qualities that we aim to improve following competition so that you continue to feel good and and can then have the desire to compete again down the track because if you're constantly driving that home um over and over and over again people they tap out from powerlifting pretty quickly as well because they're just fucked all the time yeah it's a brutal sport yeah for sure long term yeah yeah the hardest thing about powerlifting isn't isn't the first prep isn't the second prep it's the it's the 10th and the 15th and the you know 10 years into it prep yeah it's hard to do for a long time that's like half our mentorship is about longevity and how to be because that's the hard part in my eyes so the next thing is when you're done with powerlifting it's weightlifting dunking dunking dunking yeah Yeah. Dunking donuts. Cucking and dunking. Yeah. All the qualities. All the qualities. Sex appeal right there. Cuck, dunk, fuck. Well, that's it. You just pay somebody else to do the dunk for you. Now you've cucked your dunk. Beautiful. Delightful. All right. Zach you got anything you need to talk about Yeah I round this out on a solid laugh I mean unless the person died then it might not be funny But have you ever had to pull the plug on someone who went above beast mode Like someone who just like so close to death ethically, you could not continue to tell them to continue training. Extra points if you name it. You can't just say like, just do nothing. Yeah, I mean, also, like, if they're competing and their blood markers come and it's, like, comps in two weeks, but their blood pressure's higher than a priest joke. Have you ever had to pull somebody? I think you guys are probably both talking about one person in particular. No, no, no. Okay. No, I've had people definitely, like, at the end of the spectrum where I'm like, dude, your blood work and all the metrics that we've taken here are pretty bad. um and but but i think you know we've had that conversation and it's just what we were talking about before it's just like hey all i can do is have that conversation yeah you know what i mean because i think it'd be if i don't think i'm not with any powerlifters because it would be like talking to a fucking brick wall yeah there's no way i've had that i've had that conversation with a lot of bodybuilders yeah yeah a lot of bodybuilders because i um which i don't train i think i have one bodybuilder i still train because i just can't like we're talking in the car i just can't do it anymore um stress it's making your blood pressure go well i actually i actually got to the point where people would call me because they were scared of their health six seven weeks before they got on stage and they also still look like shit and their coach was just like just do more drugs like that was this big thing just we'll just hammer more drugs i'm like drugs are not going to fix this similar power thing because like once you are so far down that rabbit hole like you're not responding to training very well anyway uh maybe you get a little bit of skill here from just doing the thing more, but like, you're not getting true adaptations. Uh, you push nutrition as far as you can. Like you're as big as you can. You're as your water Buffalo and, um, drugs is really the metric that you got. This still works. And it's raw. Cause you can just, well, fuck, I can, I can just take more like this is, this is the easy one. You know, I'll just up the dose. And of course, like the, you start, like there's lesser returns from it at a certain point for sure. But like, it's still fucking works. And so like, that's the, that's the dial that they can still turn. Right. So like, that's what people end up doing. And, um, it is scary, but no, we've definitely turned people away, had stern, stern, not warnings, and, and nudged people along outside of our coaching because they were pushing the bucket a little bit too hard than what we were like I turned people away because of like constantly wanting to go down a weight class and um i just i just said to him i was like i not willing to help you cut weight because there massive health suck and this is a completely different conversation with with weight cutting and things like that that i'm just like i'm not willing to help you lose 15 of your body fat body weight every single time you want to compete so i think you go find someone else well let's go like let's make it more specific then and go like what's the highest blood pressure you've seen that like not that wasn't acute like resting chilled yeah i think that two two ten over a hundred hundred and ten yeah yeah yeah yeah i can imagine bodybuilders pretty hard yeah yeah yeah they would be that'd be up there i think i think there are some heavyweight powerlifters or strongmen that would rival it but it's it's just these sports these niche sports that don't earn you anything as well like all of the other like real sports where you get paid to do it. I can't imagine them being quite as bad either. So that's, well, I've had, I've, we've had a lot of, I've had a lot of people we've saved their lives with some of this information. Um, and our students too, like we get messages all the time that people done the hypertension course, had all their clients do, uh, do their blood pressure and then sending three or four of their clients in and immediately having to get stents put in because they were almost dead. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. The first guy I had that happen to was, oh man, it's gotta be 24, 25 years ago. Um, I was training a guy and he was, this is before I knew about any of this stuff. And he was like, man, my legs are feel really heavy. Your legs feel heavy. We haven't trained legs in a few days. That's where, so I went and looked it up and I was like, okay, that's one sign of like failing heart, congestive heart failure. So I told him he went to the doctor, they had to put stents in. He had almost every artery was 98% blocked. fuck it's crazy you've got to have like a bit of a feel-good moment as well like in in amongst the whole like fear of it it's like i've literally just saved this person's life it does until you do a leg day in the next day like my legs feel really heavy oh my god well i think in australia just as well as well on that um at least in queensland i don't know how the other states are differently but we can go we get a subsidized every every two years you can get a subsidized heavily subsidized ultrasound. Yeah, ECG. And I'm always recommending it for the guys who are maybe pushing the limits. I didn't know that. I just got my PR so I can finally get some something out of my taxes. Yeah. I get myself a free echo. Yeah. Yeah. It's not free, but it's subsidized. Largely subsidized. They help you. Yeah. Once every two years. So go get it done. How much does it cost to subsidize? Five. Because the last one I had was five. Five hundo, I think it was. Yeah. It still a couple hundred bucks I think It not It not near that bad But again if it one of those things that going to add 10 years to your life because now you can actually start to what 200 bucks Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. Yeah. A hundred percent worth it. It's nice to, even if there's nothing wrong, to go like, oh, that's a bit nice to hear. It's worth a couple hundred bucks just to hear that, you know? But anyway, let's finish this thing with just the normal plug. So, again, as I started off, you are going to make a little bit more non-conversational rambly presentation for our mentorship just on blood pressure and performance and all these things that we've talked about in a little bit more detail, a little bit more actionable advice. So if you are interested in the mentorship and you want to become a better coach and you want to hear that presentation, please reach out and I'll jump on a call and see if you are the right person for it. And as for your, I know you're just launching like an educational service online as well, as well as many other things that you do. We've got a lot of shit going on. That's the one on topic for the moment. So Zoe was here. I'm sure I'll hand the reins to her. For now, just buy muscle nerd shit. Yeah, just go buy all our stuff because I'm broke. yeah the cardboard sale will uh we'll list the details car boot sale we'll sell speakers and shirts yeah yeah you've got lots of stuff going on i know you're about to do a little bit uh uh a world not a tour but you know a few different locations around the world as well so you've got lots going on jump on the at least jump on your instagram give you a follow the muscle nerds a follow and uh not my personal you just do memes yeah don't send the my personal one just come for a laugh, go to Muscle Nerds. Yeah. Go to that for help. Sign up to the email list. Lots of resources. Fucking well worth it. Zach, if you don't already follow Luke Lehman, he would trump you on the meme train right now. That is literally all Luke does. Zach's only new to the meme game. Yeah. It's like it's – I'm a novice. I'm a novice memer. I'm a meme lord at this point. You should see the stuff I don't post. Wow. Separate. That goes to the car boot sale. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thanks very much for coming. And that's Red Hot. Actually, no, Red Hot, yeah. Thank you for listening to Nexus Unloaded. Be sure to jump on our website to find details on everything mentioned on today's podcast, plus information on our coaching, mentoring, and gym services. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at nexusperformance.aus for any updates on what we are currently doing. See you all in the next episode. you