Health, performance and not fucking it up

# Health, performance and not fucking it up

**Channel:** Pike Performance - Performance Hub Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=szvWnSQQQns

Hey guys and welcome to the Performance Hub podcast and thanks for tuning in. So before we get started we want to let you guys know about an amazing offer we have going at the moment. Using the coupon code COMMUNITY we have one month free access to the Performance Hub. So this is our online member site where we have tons of content from in-depth exercise tutorials, videos on different strength and conditioning methods program templates articles on nutrition stress management and just a ton more content so head over to www.pipeperformance.uk to sign up and get started on that today as well as that below this video we've linked all our social media channels as well as all of our guest socials so go and like and comment and share as it really helps us to be able to produce more content for you guys like the interview that we had today Okay, so that's enough of that. Let's dive into today's interview and see what it's all about. Hey guys and welcome to the Performance Hub podcast. So today we've got an amazing guest. It is Luke Lehman from the Muscle Nerds. Luke has been in the industry for a long time now and has amassed an incredible amount of knowledge about health, well-being, strength training, fitness everything that we kind of try to address every area that we that we try and help people with he really is you know I would say an expert I came in contact with Luke through the muscle nerds courses that they run and attended the foundations course and was absolutely blown away by the level of detail and the level of information that they provided over three days about everything that we do with our clients you know from ensuring that we maintain their health and the impact of everything that we do on on the kind of down to a cellular level you know every type of exercise that we use with them every diet intervention every stress management strategy like how is this impacting on our physical health you know when we talk about managing stress and it's gonna be good for you and bring your blood pressure down well let's go into that and let's really dig into that and what is actually happening on a cellular level and this stuff just it blew my mind that you know really I'm definitely going to be going back onto that course and taking Theo with me because it's such an incredible course and I feel like I can do it five times over and still come away with new information every time I do the course So I wanted to bring Luke on to the podcast for you guys because he is a literal mine of information about all things to do with the personal training and strength training and strength and conditioning, eating well, losing weight, everything that we do with people. He is going to give you some brilliant insights and I can't wait to go through some of this stuff with him. Like I said, I could sit here and waffle about it all day because I think he's such a great guy and he's had such a positive influence on my career. So let's really dig into the interview and I've got a list of questions from you guys that I'm going to ask him as well as the stuff that I want to speak to him about. Welcome Luke, thanks for joining us on the Performance Hub podcast. Really, in the words of Bernardo Faria, it's a huge honour to have you here. It's a jiu-jitsu joke by the way for people listening. So I first came in contact with you through the Muscle Nerds foundation course that I attended and was blown away by the kind of level of content and information that you provided around health and well-being and fitness and getting stronger and how basically to help all our clients with that stuff and just not fuck them up. Maybe a lot of people are doing or a certain amount of people are doing hopefully it's getting better but how did you kind of get to that point? Do you want to tell us a bit about your kind of background how you arrived at where you are today with the muscle mass? Yeah I guess you know just in a kind of reader's digest version you know I've been lifting weights and being in sports since I was a little kid so I started lifting weights when I was around eight years old, right? So I'm originally from Texas. Now I live in Australia. And if you know anything about Texas and high school football, like I was the true Friday night lights where the entire city shuts down and everyone's at the football game. So we start basically getting ready for that when we were little kids. And so I wanted to be a step ahead. So I started learning I gotta lift weights I you know kind of my start was seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian and I saw I saw Conan and I was like that is what a man supposed to look like right and then I looked at my father who my father is a was a very small man he was about five foot seven and uh and he's not not a big jack guy and I'm thinking I'm looking at my dad going well I'm never going to look like Conan. But then I looked at my mom and my mom's of like German Austrian heritage. She's really tall. And I'm the runt of that side of the family. And I went, okay, so if I lift weights and play my cards, right, I might actually be able to do that. And so I started lifting weights, basically to put on size for football and, and for martial arts and things. And back then, we didn't, you know, this back in, you know, back in the 80s, we didn't have a lot of access to information like we have now. So I just started the standard, you know, push-ups, curls, squats, and running and things like that. And it just kept developing that. And then in about 1992, I got the internet, and that kind of opened everything up to learning about who Charles Poliquin was and Charles Staley and Paul Cech and all these guys that I've learned from over the years. And, yeah, I just kind of went head first into it and started a powerlifting team in my high school. um our powerlifting team dominated pretty much everybody the four years i was in high school left high school decided to try my hand at bodybuilding and didn't really like it too much went back to powerlifting went back to physique stuff went went in a strong man so i kind of did all these everything was about strength right and that uh it's it's six foot one and and 220 to 250 pounds depending on how good i'm a diet and how i'm lifting i'm never going to be a really great runner so I just did what I was good at which was strength and power um and so that's I got to a point where you know I was a at the time a fairly accomplished powerlifter very strong but I could barely walk up the stairs without being out of breath and then I started I went and worked at Polican group for a while being one of the lead instructors and at some point I just had this epiphany that man maybe we've got things all wrong like strength There's just one tool in the box. And I started getting into more of the body weight movement stuff and actually getting my cardiovascular respiratory system into shape. And I started thinking about being more well-rounded. And I think too, like I'm 42 now, you get to a certain point where maybe you're in your late 30s. Some people go out and they buy a Corvette. They have a midlife crisis. My midlife crisis was getting my blood pressure in check because I had stage two hypertension, getting my triglycerides in check. They were sitting at 400 and they should be under 90. I had all of these kind of coming to Jesus talks with myself about what was important for the second half of my life. And for me, it was putting my health first and then putting my performance secondary, which is something I hadn't done up to that point. And so when I left Paulick and started Muscle Nerds, my wife and I decided that everything we do would be on the foundation of health first and performance secondary. it. So you know you obviously got I think you said when we were on the course that you got your squat was over 300 kilos and you got pretty pretty strong you know competitive in that respect but your markers your BP and you know resting heart rate triglycerides and things like that your bloods weren't great you know could you do you think if you went back and did it again and did it with your current kind of approach that prioritizes health and building a good aerobic base and things like this that you could still get that strong or stronger or do you think it was a necessary useful having to kind of train in that way to get there well anytime look is whenever you're at the highest level of sport it's not going to be healthy but like back then I mean that was back when powerlifters did no conditioning there there was no such thing as a sled and a prowler we thought that conditioning was for marathon runners and you didn't you know we didn't do barbell curls because that was for girls and it was all that type of mentality right yeah um and i think yeah if i could if i could buy a delorean and find a flux capacitor and go back in time and have a talking to jesus talking myself i probably i probably would have been an even better power lifter and i probably could have been you know world class power lifter but you know i got to the point where it just wasn't worth having you know being in pain and getting winded walking up a flight of stairs it just became to me like I didn't I got to a point where I'm squatting like 318 and I'm dead lifting like you know 333 or so and that that I was the strongest person that almost every gym I went to but I was also not sleeping well I had sleep apnea you know I couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath I'd be out of breath just sitting there doing nothing And I think if I could go back in time and reteach myself there you can definitely be incredibly strong even elite level strength and still have adequate conditioning for life. And, you know, when we first started muscle nerds, no one was really talking about this, but after teaching foundations around the world a few times, we know lots of power lifters right now who are like some of the top power lifters in Australia that are now saying, hey, you need to do your aerobic work. You need to keep in an adequate level of conditioning to keep these metrics in check so that you don't die. Because if there's one thing that's really horrible for performance, it's dying. That's definitely going to kill performance, which is a concept. That's a concept I got from Broderick Chavez, who's well known for training palifters. and he's also a paddle lifter and a biologist. And I think, yeah, you just have to look at how do I balance this stuff out? You know, if I can get it, you know, the hard part is getting where you need to be. The easy part is the maintenance. So I think if a lot of people will start, like, really reassessing where they are and saying, okay, yeah, sure, I can squat 300 kilos, but my blood pressure is 180 over 100 i can probably afford to spend eight weeks getting my blood pressure down without my without my total going down too much my total will actually probably go up even higher if i'm more conditioned because if i'm more conditioned i recover better and i can train harder and i can train with a lot more volume and i can eat a lot more food yeah so so i got like a list of questions but we'll get straight into this one which i was going to do a little bit later but you know I saw or I listened to or watched the the round table that you did uh recently with Dr. Mike T. Nelson and uh Alex Vader is it um yeah and it was interesting you you guys were talking about cardio for lifters or aerobic work for power lifters weight lifters things like this and it's often a hard sell when you're working with someone who's just trying to build max strength as to taking a bit of time off of that pursuit and building that aerobic base. So that's something that you would look to do is, is kind of pull someone back from their strength training, if you like, and spend some time just focusing on some of that low and slow building, building that aerobic capacity. Yeah. And yeah, I think one of the problems is people, people always look at as it's either this or that. Okay. So it's either I'm going to either lift or I'm going to condition. If you decide that you're going to take health into your hands again and you're going to do some aerobic work, that's very low intensity work. It's not really going to screw the recovery. The thing that you have to manage is, number one, how much time do you have? If I don't have a lot of time, I've got to take care of what's important. The second thing is I have to feed for nutrition. I have to feed for performance. right? So if I'm going to do more work, I'm going to have to feed myself more food, which a lot of people tend to forget that part. The secondary thing is, it's all about, you know, dose makes the poison, right? So if someone is still powerlifting, or they're a shot putter, or if they're whatever it is, whatever strength sport they're in, it doesn't mean that they need to stop doing that work. They just need to de-emphasize it for a little bit of time and emphasize other qualities. And that's kind of the problem is whenever you're, especially if it's a, if it's a sport where it's dictated around one big quality, like maximal strength, people tend to go too far to the extreme on that. And they start forgetting there's other qualities that they need to keep maintained. Whenever you, whenever you're in something where you're really going for one singular type of quality, you're going to have to sacrifice other qualities, other places, right? It's the same thing with sports performance and getting stronger. You know, you have one sector of the strength conditioning population to say, well, you need to get as strong as possible. Being stronger is always better, but that's not actually the case. Like, there is a limit on how strong you need to be for, say, a certain sport, like American football or for soccer or for whatever, you need to be just strong enough. If you keep trying to get stronger, stronger and stronger, then where are you going to fit in things like power and speed training, agility, change of direction. You know, there's a lot of other things that you're avoiding because you're glorifying getting your squat higher. Overvaluing, I suppose, that max end number. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you look at like, even like things like West side style, like what, what Louie Simmons popularized with what he calls a conjugate training right If we look at a concurrent training plan you can still go for max lifts There nothing inherently wrong with that But what you probably want to do if you have high blood pressure, high resting heart rate, and your metrics are off a little bit, you might just want to spend 20 minutes working out to a good one to five rep max, and then maybe do some conditioning off the side of that. Do a couple of accessory movements and add some really easy, steady aerobic work after aerobic intervals or something else don't avoid it because you think that's going to make your total go down or that's going to make you weaker because that that doesn't seem to be the case this is interesting because um i guess block the kind of eastern style block periodization is was traditionally you know really popular um i guess maybe you could say that conjugate is or the west side thing is almost it's got some of that to it but then obviously you have this undulating nature to it but um that concurrent training became much less popular um in kind of the last i don't know 10 or 20 years um but it seems to be coming back now and i think um a chap who i interviewed for the podcast a couple of weeks ago chris myer sent be an excerpt from a Dan Baker interview and he was kind of talking about the way maybe MMA is starting to change the way we look at training or strength and conditioning for sports in terms of in MMA we need to use you know aerobic fitness, alactic, lactate, all your you know your energy systems are all going to be heavily needed as well as that max end strength you know and we're they're able to generate and and train all those things seemingly concurrently maybe we can apply that same kind of methodology to the weight room. And it seems to be building popularity now, just training everything at once and maybe just increasing or decreasing the amount we're focusing on different, you know, aspects of that. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing, right? We've got different categories of what we're trying to build and what you need to be looking at is what am I the weakest at? Okay. So if, if let's look at like strength, let's look at speed and power, let's look at conditioning aerobically, let's look at anaerobic conditioning. So we can section that off as force. We can section that off as velocity. We can section that off as your aerobic reserve. And then we can section that off or VO2 max. And then we can section that off as lactate threshold. Those four things are inherently incredibly important, especially for MMA and fighting arts. You know, you walk into any jiu-jitsu club and you talk to every single person in there and they're going to say, oh, jiu-jitsu is anaerobic. You don't need to be aerobic. Well, I hate to tell you this, but once you exceed two minutes of activity, it's massively aerobic at that point. And this is why you're getting gassed when you're training. If we think about a match, it's going to be at minimum probably five minutes. What happens if you don't have the stamina to go past two or three minutes? And that's kind of at my last jiu-jitsu tournament, um i went into it saying okay i'm going to be the strongest fastest most well-conditioned fighter and i'm also going to be the the best well-fed because i'm going to plan appropriately um and i dominated it not because my technique's great because it's not my technique i i i'm very i'm a pressure player i don't know a lot of jokes i'm not good at setting things up i don't i'm not good at submissions but what i'm good at is if i get on top of you you're screwed because i can get real fucking heavy and I can wear you down until you make a mistake and I'll just score points until the time I'll run the timeout I'm a I'm one of those shady dudes it'll ramp up 21 points on you and then I'll just lay on your ass until the time goes out because you're you're breathing so hard you can't do anything anymore right I love it it is you've got to play on your strengths and I know my strength is strength and conditioning and and nutrition my strength is not my technique um So, you know, now going forward, when we can start doing jujitsu again, my next thing will be getting better at actual jujitsu instead of just using my physical abilities to grind people down, right? But that's one thing I see, too, with a lot of the MMA guys. They're very strong on the mat, but then you take them in the weight room and they're really fucking weak. Like imagine what would happen if you were actually decently strong in the gym and how much that would translate onto the mat, especially if we think about strength being the mother quality for power and speed. Well, if you're the type of fighter that's a very proactive fighter, speed and power is to your benefit. You're not going to be able to produce a lot of speed and power without building a base level of strength. and then you're not going to be able to repeat that strength, power, and speed over and over and over

You don't have the conditioning to survive that. So if you've got eight fights in a day, you might have two or three really good fights. And then you're destroyed if your conditioning and your nutrition isn't up to par. You're going to have a horrible end of the day fights, which is what I observed at the last tournament I went to. All of these guys were doing massive weight cuts to try to cut down into their category. I actually planned my weight cut six months out. And so I cut down for six months and I cut down below where I needed to be. And then I fed up into my tournament, which was a massive benefit for me. You know, and that's kind of what they need to start. That's what they need to start thinking about. Like the MMA strength conditioning industry is just horrendous. Like you've got a couple of people that actually know what they're doing, but the majority of it's still really old school. And, you know, they're still standing on BOSU balls and, you know, throwing around a fucking band instead of just getting very good at the basic foundational lifts and then throw the silly shit in there once you're, once you're decently strong. So it sounds like you're kind of the value in S and C for combat athletes would be building that aerobic base, building that max in strength and then, you know, where, where appropriate or where time appropriate using, uh, building some power. Um, and those three things probably being your, you know, where you're going to get the most return for your investment really. Yeah, I feel that way. And I mean, And that's my competition coach is really about, you know, he's really a very proactive fighter. And kind of his method of how he coaches us to fight is to at whatever level your competitor is at, you stay just a little bit higher than that. And when you see them fade out, then you just turn it up because they're done. Like you've ground them into the ground. So if I'm walking into a fight and I'm well conditioned and I can maintain just a little bit more energy than the other person, the minute they start to falter, they're going to start making mistakes. And I'm going to capitalize on that. And then you have to think. Sorry. So just, just to go back to your condition, like looking at someone being well conditioned, what are your markets for being well conditioned? You know, what are you looking at when, when you sort of get someone in front of you? Yeah. So we'll do a VO2 max assessment initially, because what we want to make sure is that you have a good aerobic reserve. Right. And so the two things I'm looking at is we might run a modified Cooper test where we do a 12 minute time trial on a rower and aerodyne or whatever. And then we look at your resting heart rate. My metric says, I want to see that you have very high maximal heart rate. How high can I push that? And then how low is my resting heart rate? Because if you have high maximal heart rate and low resting heart rate, you're going to have a very large VO2 max. And the higher your maximal heart rate is, the benefit of that is that you can control your heart rate more efficiently while you're fighting. As your heart rate goes up, you start losing motor skills. And so if you think about what we're doing when we're grappling, for instance, there's a lot of fine and complex motor skill activation going on, and there's a high level of cognitive thinking going on. The higher my heart rate goes, if I don't have good heart rate tolerance, then I start making mistakes. If I make mistakes, I get caught in something, right? So like, for instance, for me, my maximal heart rate's around 203 right now, okay? And I've gotten it up to that point by doing a lot of aerobic training up front to get that really high and to get my resting heart rate down close to 50. That being said, as the percentage of heart rate goes up, I can maintain a much lower percentage of my maximal heart rate than my opponent, which means he's going to make mistakes and I'm not. He's going to gas out first and I'm not. So we look at that with our fighters, first and foremost, as far as the conditioning. And we think about, if you think about strength as being the mother of all qualities for like speed and power and for performance, aerobic conditioning is the mother of all qualities when it comes to the conditioning side. The bigger and broader aerobic base I have, the higher that VO2 max ceiling, the higher I can get my lactate threshold going which means I can make more energy a lot faster without getting too much of a pump and dropping too much adrenaline and cramping up and things like that when I'm working on something so you're obviously we can bring that resting heart rate down with aerobic training and you know predominantly aerobic training but our max heart rate you know correct me if I'm wrong but most that's going to be generally governed by genetics no and our age well that's what we're told right and what's the typically what in research what will they use to 20 minus your age right or they'll use like the map yeah they'll use a very ambiguous calculation because it's a lot easier to if you have 400 people in a study it a lot easier to do to 20 minus your age than it is to run 400 stress tests and actually find out where people vo2 maxes are but you know this is stuff that easy if you have a heart rate strap and you got a a smartphone this is really easy you just go as hard as you can for as long as you can you see how high your heart rate can get this is all stuff that's trainable um when i first started getting into the conditioning aspect and realizing that I needed to get that up high fast. 220 minus my age was pretty much spot on. But at the time, I was only lifting and it was either I was like a sedentary lifter, right? I was sitting at a desk all day and lifting weights four or five times a week. And resting heart rate was about 188. By the end of training, training for 10k run, it was sitting at 203. And then I've actually got the ability to measure serum lactate, and I can hold a very high heart rate while not really producing shit tons of lactate. So that's going to show me that I'm managing the intracellular components of ATP breakdown and energy production. So does that mean that through aerobic training, you've actually managed to kind of raise your anaerobic threshold a bit? Yeah, so if I can... or much return in trying to increase that. Well, yeah, but we're not a slave to our genetics, are we? Now, there are going to be some people that are on the extremes, right? So if we looked at a traditional bell curve, most people are going to sit in the middle of the bell curve, somewhere in that 70%. Then you're going to have freaks like Kenyan runners who went all the marathon races, right? If you look at that and some of the other guys who are really good at endurance training, they tend to have naturally a higher VO2 max. They tend to have mechanisms in their bodies that allows them to have a higher VO2 max. But that doesn't mean that you can't improve that because you can improve that massively. You can improve that massively and you can massively improve your tolerance for hydrogen ions by raising that lactate ceiling. But the problem is you can't really raise that lactate threshold very high if you don't raise the VO2 max ceiling as well because you're always going to be kept out at the VO2 max ceiling. So if you're getting guys coming in, we tend to use a concept two test and then use the calculator on the website. And what I find is most of the jiu-jitsu and MMA guys are actually pretty good. Their VO2 max are coming in pretty high. But it's always, I guess, you know, improve their aerobic output, you know, in terms of on the mats, you know, making them fitter, you know, rather than just saying, okay, it's high. Let's just not concentrate on that. Yeah, I think it's going to be a component of how experienced they are. Depends on a sedentary person walks in and starts training jujitsu. They're typically, if they don't do the typical white belt stuff, if they come in and they listen to the experienced guys where they're saying, conserve your energy, don't freak out, those guys are going to make a tremendous amount of hydrogen very quickly because they have a massive dump in adrenaline because, you know, there's there's nothing that's going to make you more stressed out than somebody sitting on your face and pinning your arms down right so but once you learn how to control that fear of being strangled and that fear of being suffocated and that fear of being held down you start learning to manage your energy from an output perspective but then you can also train the mitochondria and you can train the the cardiovascular respiratory system to bring that vo2 max back up so i think it's really a lot of it's going to be dictated by, you know, where you are in that journey. Are you a beginner? Are you kind of in the middle? Are you at the end of it? One thing that I noticed with a lot of the guys, because you know how it is guys, guys come in and they train for six months and are doing really well. And then life happens and they don't train for like three months. So they get in pretty decent shape in six months. And when they come back three months later, it's like they never fucking trained before. They come back and they're completely out of shape again. What I found that is if you do the cross training and you, you work on your heart and you work on your vascular system and you work on your mitochondria, it's a lot easier to get in shape really quickly when you come back to it. And it has much less chance of it dropping off. Definitely. And that's, you know, you touched on kind of the mental aspects of conditioning and that's definitely something I want to touch on at some point about that. When I did the Joel Jameson certification they spoke about that you know the different components of conditioning and the mental side of it was super interesting how we can literally use use up physical energy that we can use on physical performance just kind of worrying and not going into a combat situation in the right mindsets definitely something super interesting absolutely because look all of these things are going to be they going to be dictated by asterisk effectors so the more stressed I am going into a match or going into a role the more likely I gonna gas out really fast because I'm gonna have a huge adrenaline a huge adrenaline um um I'm looking for dump which is then going to make me shaky I'm gonna I'm gonna screw up my bioenergetics I'm not going to be able to compete very long. I found that out. And the thing is, I know all this stuff, right? And then but nothing prepares you for your very first match at a competition. And I remember, I was fighting a guy, it was my first fight ever at a tournament, it was his first fight ever. I walked up, he's probably, we're about the same age, he was a bit more weathered than me. You could tell that he didn't take care of himself. And I just saw the fear in his eyes when I walked up because I walked up, I was shredded and jacked. And he's looking at me like, Oh my god, I got to fight this guy. And I'm looking at him thinking, fuck, it doesn't really matter how jacked and shredded you are. This guy's techniques better than mine. He's going to choke me out in 30 seconds. And the minute I got him on the ground, I could tell like, Oh, this is not going to go well for him. He is not ready and not conditioned for this. So kind of the start of the fight, everything was going well for me until about three and a half minutes in when I realized I'm holding him too hard and I'm working too hard. And I remember I had his back and I had my hooks in and I'm, I'm reaching across trying to grab his lapel. And I just realized I can't, I can't flex or extend my arm and my hands don't work anymore. Yeah. And I got real shaky and I, and I'm like, I don't understand like my brain is telling my arm to go across his neck and I can't actually get my arm to go there. And my elbows started to seize up. Then my adductor started to seize up and I went, okay, this is what my coach was talking about when he says I need to relax, you know, because that, that, that mental side, your brain's going to control everything in the peripheral system. And if your brain feels like it's in a threatened state, especially in combat, it's going to overreact and it's going to then push out too much adrenaline and things which is going to exhaust you much faster and make you cramp a lot faster okay so much stuff that you kind of mentioned and there are a few things that i want to go back to and dig into um you mentioned about you sort of briefly just mentioned about the impacts of you know about um aerobic training on our mitochondria and this is something that we're hearing a lot more about lately is you know mitochondria being you know powerful for the cell and being so important for for health and fitness do you want to just touch on that a little bit because i know that was something that we spoke about a lot in the course and the impact of a good training regime on our mitochondria and how that can benefit our health yeah so i mean this is where you're making the majority energy right through the mitochondria so if i have someone who is chronically stressed out over time if if their metabolic flexibility is very low we get to a point where the mitochondria is not working as effectively as it should. We're not oxidizing things as effectively as we should. Once you stop oxidizing things effectively, and if you think about that word oxidizing, what element on the periodic table do you need to oxidize things? You need oxygen. So that in and of itself should be a case of, hey, maybe I do want to do some aerobics because that's the one thing that gets more oxygen into my body and allows me to oxidize better. The better my mitochondria work and the more mitochondria I have up to a point the more energy I can make faster and the more endurance I have as well as the more food I can eat because I can churn through that much better and then when you think about the majority of your fighters that you that you're in contact with how do they eat yeah it's yeah it varies but some of them not great some of them but often they're you know probably in a calorie deficit more often than not I think oh and they're in a massive calorie deficit. I know guys, I know guys that compete at the, at the top levels that they're lucky to eat 1200 to 1800 calories a day. And it just blows my mind because I remember getting ready for my first tournament. I was eating five to 6,000 calories a day because I was dropping weight too quickly. And so then I looked at my competition coach and I'm going, how are you surviving on 1800 calories a day? And then I realized, cause I trained, I was training him at the time as well well no wonder you're getting gassed out no wonder you have all these injuries that won't heal you're not feeding yourself enough enough to uh make the stuff heal so the first thing is if we work on that mitochondria sorry the dog just walked in if if we're working on the mitochondria initially we're going to have a lot more energy to perform and keep that performance higher over time because that really the key First you have to perform but then you have to keep that performance high over five minutes Or what if you in a super fight and it a 20 submission fight What happens if it gets past 10 minutes and you don't have the ability to manage the next 10 minutes? You're pretty screwed. So what we like to do is work on that aerobic base first, get the mitochondria functioning much better initially. then we can then to me you've now deserved to do the higher level stuff now if you want to do hit training and you want to do all that that's great you can do all that but you can't a lot of people will start with the intense stuff before they've laid the foundation of the easy stuff first right so it's not and it sounds uh it sounds counterintuitive to take a step back and able to go forward. But, you know, there's also the saying in judo, slow and smooth, smooth is fast. Sometimes you have to slow things down, right, before you can make them fast. And the same thing with weight training as well. Why do we teach people to go with slow tempo weight training initially? It's to get very good at the exercise before you speed the exercise up. And so the same thing goes with the conditioning too. I need to lay down the machinery that's going to allow me to have the endurance and the recovery capacity to uh to perform at a high level which means that in a lot of cases i want to make sure that that anaerobic and aerobic side of my metabolism is balanced out okay so um you'll see a lot of the fighters are very anaerobically conditioned they're just not very aerobically conditioned right so we're we always i mean we've been told by men's health and and whoever else maybe across i don't know for a long time that like kind of HIIT training will be enough and that will get us our aerobic gains or you can get better aerobic kind of gains from HIIT training than steady state and but I think now we're starting to kind of dispel that myth is that right or maybe I've got that wrong no I mean it will one thing is we have to define what we're talking about with HIIT training right so again we've we've split this into two different categories you have you have researchers that will look at at high intensity interval training as a as a factor of how high you can keep your heart rate for a certain amount of time. But then you'll have another side of the researchers that dictate hit as power output. And I tend to look at it as more power output. How high can I have my power output? How long can I maintain that power? For me, that's going to be more important when we're talking about sports is that I can maintain power and repeat that power over and over and over across however many minutes I have to compete at. So things like intervals and things like that. what's that so things like a lactic intervals lactic power intervals things like this yeah I'm like even things like like a lactic intervals to me if if it's a like that with complete rest I don't see a lot of usability for that in combat sports there's no there's nothing you're really going to do that's gonna last ten seconds that you need to recover from right you're probably you're probably looking more towards building an aerobic base and building enough glycolytic base so that you can maintain a high level of power and endurance by using both fat and carbohydrate equally at the same time. Okay. So, but just to go back to the question, you're saying that we need to lay that foundation with like lifts, essentially low intensity, you know, steady state cardio. Could it be done with interval training or is it really that we need to focus on that low intensity stuff? Actually, yeah, that was one of the questions you had, like, what's the usability of lists? I mean, there's a reason why over the last however many hundred years that we've been having combat sports that people do road work. Like why do boxers do road work? Why do if you go to Thailand, and you go and you do Muay Thai, you're going to be running a lot. Okay, and there's a good reason for that they understand the value of that. Now I do think that that can be taken to an extreme, like we're not trying to create marathon but being able to go out and do a 5k and maybe a couple of 5k intervals and perform that really at a high level is probably going to be beneficial for you but again whenever we talk about cardio there's two things people think about they either think about weight loss or they think about running a marathon they think about like the two most extreme things you can think of I'm thinking about adaptation right I'm thinking about recovery I'm I'm thinking about better sleep I'm thinking about the ability to eat more food the ability to maintain power output for a long time that's the stuff I'm thinking about and it doesn't take a long time to build that aerobic base depending on where you start right if you start in your VO2 max if you put somebody in a concept 2 and they're at a 24 yeah it's gonna take them a while to get that up but for most people I see massive improvements in just six to eight weeks of dead

VO2 max training if you just get that out of the way the drop off from that is very very low you just get that out of the way and then kind of put that on maintenance and you can you can maintain a lot of that you know just doing easy flow rolls and things like that if you go and you know go in on a you know open mat and just find somebody who wants to do easy flow rolling for 20 or 30 minutes very easy to maintain that cardiovascular adaptation and then then you can focus on other things like if you want to throw in you know more hit type training that's good too now the secondary thing with this is when we look at hit training we have to we have to dictate what we're looking for you're looking for global cardiovascular respiratory adaptations or you're looking at localized localized conditioning right so global conditioning is vo2 max localized is do I have enough enzymes and then do I have the machinery in my peripheral system to then take you know take advantage of that extra oxygen like doing things like rowing and running and the airdyne and the skier and that type of thing will build a lot of good global conditioning if i'm going to turn that into localized conditioning which i should when i move it into a more specific phase now since you've done joel jameson's things this is where we're looking at things like hris and hicts and things like that to then build the machinery localized in my limbs to then be able to take advantage of that and be able to oxidize better now that I can get that oxygen in. So if you think about the first thing is you have to get the oxygen into the body, then you have to get the machinery and the peripheral system to be able to utilize that oxygen as well. So if I can't get the oxygen in, it doesn't matter how good I am locally, I still have to support that with my lungs and with my heart, with my vascular system. So it makes sense go ahead and take care of that first then get really specific on you know heavy sled pushes and pulls and strongman type work and then working more on that really high intensity interval training side of it now that i can take advantage of epoch because i can get oxygen in now yeah i suppose if again taking that to the next level if you can do that with specific movements that spp stuff in like your drilling or you know specific mma or jiu-jitsu related movements going to be kind of even more you know efficient and you know preparing you for the task at hand yeah i mean if you go like like just imagine you know if you go to a if you don't go to a fight specific class where you're getting ready for a tournament you're going to do things like shark tank like you're going to be in there you're going to you're going to be going hard balls to the wall if you have a good level of aerobic foundation it's not going to be as hard for you as if you you didn't, right? So it's only going to be a benefit, right? And you see that, right? You go to a competition class, and you can see the guys who, it's their first class, and they don't know what to expect, and then they quickly realize this isn't a normal class, and you're basically rolling hard, like you're basically fighting for your life for 60 to 90 minutes, and they find out really quickly after 10 to 15 minutes of this, holy shit, I need to get in shape. It's the stress tester. I know my heart rate always goes up. If the coach says, well, it's Shark Tank today, you're like, fuck. I wish I could have that pizza for lunch. Okay, you touched on your jiu-jitsu coaching, kind of the example you gave around probably globally amongst MMA fighters. But actually, let's even look out at the weight loss population and how people tend to just survive in a calorie deficit. So if we switch our focus to a weight loss scenario, it could be a fighter or it could just be someone trying to lose weight we like in my practice i often see people coming in and it seems as if when we look at their diet that they've been existing for a long time in a calorie deficit you know probably underneath there even without calculating their calorie need you can see that they're probably in a calorie deficit and when you do calculate it certainly backs that up but they're potentially not losing weight and potentially you know just they say that they're fine but objectively you could look at it and think they're probably not fine can you just think some of that about why you know being in a calorie deficit long periods of time maybe isn't the best thing for people yeah so i thought about that a lot that question that you had sent me and there's a few different scenarios that you see you have people that you know you have one like we'll go through a few different clients client a client a has no idea about food and calories they think they do because maybe they watch something on Oprah or whatever I don't know but they don't realize how many calories are actually in the food they're eating and they don realize they eating twice the amount of calories then they supposed to be eating you get that you get that client to that client that is very easy to manage You teach them about food you get them tracking for a small amount of time so that they can eyeball their food. And then they realize, shit, I'm actually eating 400 calories more than I thought. Or in some cases, double what they thought they were eating. Then you have on the extreme other side of that, you have people that have been in a very severe deficit for a long time we see this a lot in the physique industry where yeah I know girls that eat seven to nine hundred calories a day and they train like 24 hours a week right it's like how are you even surviving on that and and that's all they're doing they're surviving they're not actually you know they're losing their periods their hairs falling out their fingernails are getting brittle and breaking off like they're barely getting through the day you know they've got all these issues going on. And so in that case, a lot of those people need to understand like being in a long-term calorie deficit like that is eventually going to lead to something called REDS, which is relative energy deficiency syndrome, where if I don't have enough calories to support everything my body needs biologically, it's going to get rid of the things that it doesn't actually need to survive like what do you need to survive my brain my heart my kidneys my liver like all those vital organs still need to be able to operate your ovaries don't need to operate well your balls don't need to operate well right like yeah so like I like to talk about it like like a car right if you're driving your car and you're you're running out of gas and you're five kilometers away from the nearest petrol station what's the fit in it's hot outside it's 40 degrees Celsius outside what's the first thing you're gonna turn off to try to save gas you don't have to push your car maybe the air con you can turn off the air con you're gonna roll the windows down and suffer you're probably gonna turn the radio off too like you're gonna turn off anything that you don't need because you don't want to have to push that car the rest of the way so that's kind of what your body does as well if it's running low on energy, it's just going to turn off the air conditioner, it's going to turn off the radio, it's going to turn off anything it doesn't need so it can actually make it to the next meal. So you can get into situations where people have been chronically dieting for a long time and or they're not eating enough for the activity that they're doing. And so they get this metabolic maladaptation where things start to slow down or they're just eliminate things for a small period of time, kind of puts them in hibernation until you actually make that deficit back up. And you see it a lot like people, people when they when January comes around, what's everybody do? I'm going to go to the gym. This is my year. 20 years in a row. 20th time. This is my year to get in shape and lose all this flab. They jump into the gym and they start thrashing themselves and they go on like a 12 to 1500 calorie diet. And they don't realize that that calories in calories out model their calories out is so high that they really when you do the math they don't have enough energy coming in to support basic life systems so their body starts shutting things down in order to just get by right so in a lot of cases those chronic dieters need to massively increase their calories at least close to maintenance so typically what we'll do is when we have somebody that's been chronically dieting like that, we'll take them to almost maintenance less, maybe 10% calories. And that's usually a lot more, 800, 900, sometimes 1,200 calories more than they've been eating. Now, all of a sudden, thermogenesis gets upregulated. They're not freezing cold all the time. All of a sudden, they get the period back. They can get a solid boner, and now they want to have sex. So that's great. They're sleeping better. Their guts aren't dysfunctional. But it's a really hard sell to someone who's been chronically dieting that listen you're going to have to eat more for a small amount of time and you're probably going to have to gain a little weight initially before we can start dieting again right um i i don't have a problem with long-term dieting or long continuous dieting as long as the deficit that is only small enough to chip away at body fat right but that's not what people do people will they'll they'll write a diet and they'll be eating you know 60 of what they need to be eating um and then they do that for months and months and months and months whereas they might they might only need to just pull 15 of their calories out and they could do that for a long period of time if they're going to pull a lot of calories out then it's probably going to be beneficial to throw in some refeeds right and so one of the tools we'll use for that is um basically We'll have them take their, we'll have them track their, um, their afternoon temperature. And if that really low then we overfeed them until we get the temperature higher and then we start a deficit um if they if they cruising along we see a trend in their body temperature going down it's time for a refeed or it's time for a diet break what are you so what would you say is the significant drop in body temperature so typically what we see is we see girls in the high 34s low 35s and that's when and then then you know it's the typical symptoms like i'm cold all the time cold hands and feet they usually have super low blood pressure they have no energy to do anything they're just surviving on sheer willpower that's something we see what we like to do is let's try to get you around you know 36 4 to 36 8 and then then we'll start chipping some calories away but if we see that that that temperature starts to tank we're going to need to do a diet break or a refeed well yeah i like that i've not heard of that actually using like those metrics to kind of indicate when we do a refeed I know a lot of people might do every three or four weeks or eight weeks or something like that just you know in a refeed because they know they've been in a kind of deficit for a while but having a metric there to kind of indicate when your body is actually starting to lose some of that functions it's great you know because we've got the data data so important isn't it it makes more sense to do it that way right so it makes more sense to not use ambiguous time periods because everybody's totally different right when i was when i was teaching at uh pollock and group our thing was de-load your workout every third workout if you're doing heavy strength work but not ever not everybody needs that right if i can use a metric like resting heart rate and hrv if i see if i have somebody in their third week and resting heart rate is starting to go up and their hrv starting to tank i already know they're over reaching it's time for a deload at that point or it's time to switch emphasis on what they're training same thing with the thermometer the only problem is there's not a lot of data like if you talk to people who are evidence-based they're going to go oh well you know there's not a lot of literature out there with the thermometer stuff but like we use it with a lot of success um you know that's something that uh and you've probably heard you know i don't know when you did foundations but it's kind of what when we started doing our level two foundation we started talking about thyroid and thermogenesis stuff that was kind of a point to watch people's temperature if it starts to drop and they're feeling cold then they probably don't have enough energy intake to ramp up thermogenesis we probably want to take care of that because that's going to be super important and that's a good indicator that you've pushed it too far yeah super super interesting i think that is a that's a bit of a game changer for a lot of people who are probably trying to lose weight and maybe struggling to lose weight they've been in a calorie deficit for a long time things have kind of slowed down and it's like where do you go from that you cut yourself your calories down from 2,000 to 1,500 to maybe a thousand and you're saying what I can't cut it down anymore and you see people you know with the best of intentions giving this advice that your weight loss is stalled you know it's time to pull your calories down because calorie deficit is the most important thing and it's like well how far do you know what point yeah stop doing that I mean, do you just keep pulling it down to your zero calories and you're like doing a 40-day Jesus fast? I don't know. Or do you eat, you know, celery so it's like negative calories or whatever people say, right? It's just at some point, you got to look at it and say, I feel horrible. I'm not losing weight. Something's not working. Maybe I try doing the opposite of what I'm doing. Maybe I go back to maintenance for a period of time, see if I feel better. maybe I cut the training down a little bit or try a different type of training and see if things see if things work out the the only problem is that for a lot of people that initial weight gain kind of screws with them and you know and it when when people are desperate the thinking portion of their brain kind of turns off and they start thinking very limbically and very emotionally so if I have someone who's been dieting and you know they're they're not seeing a success if I tell if I say hey Karen look we're gonna pump your calories up like 800 you are going to gain a small amount of weight this is not fat it's most likely just water glycogen and fecal matter that's all it is like that you take a good solid poo it'll come right off you get in a really hot bath and sweat it off like an MMA athlete it'll come right back off but the minute they get on the scale one of the issues is they're identifying their identity surrounds that scale, right? So the minute they get on the scale and it goes up, their feeling of self-worth goes down and they see that as a negative and then they starve themselves the next day. Okay. So in a lot of cases, it takes a lot of time coaching and saying, look, you gaining this weight is okay. That does not define you. And if you want to get better, you going to have to gain a little weight initially And what crazy is the most I typically see people gain I don think I ever had a girl gain more than about three kilos in weight with refeeding even doubling their calories Because once you start adding those calories back all those systems that have been dormant now turn on Their body heat goes up. They burn more calories when they train. They're sleeping better. Like the body has a really good, it's very efficient at moving itself up and down depending on what you're doing to it. So it's very good at keeping you alive when you're doing dumb shit to it. It's just the psychological aspect of convincing them that it has to get a little bit worse before it gets better because you're at 900 calories. I'm not willing to take you to 600 calories, and I'm not willing to add five more training sessions because that's not going to provide a long-term solution. and it's it's the whole experience is just it's just really having an impact on the nervous system as well i imagine you know that more more training less and less food and this is one of the things that really you know was struck a chord with me when i did the foundations course was how or the impact of the nervous system and you know being in that kind of stress response for long periods of time the impact again that that is having on our on our health on a broad spectrum of different areas of our health um is so powerful and there are things that we just wouldn't expect there are certain aspects that you know that increase cortisol that we just wouldn't expect i don't know if you want to dig into some of that stuff so i know it's a big thing that we're looking at nowadays in the industry yeah and the thing is i i hate i hate saying cortisol because if you say that, then it kind of demonizes cortisol. And cortisol, what it's doing is it's actually protecting you. It's actually keeping you alive because of what you're doing to yourself. So in a lot of cases, probably the main thing that's really screwing people up, if we want to blame something, it's probably going to be adrenaline. Because adrenaline, If you think about listening to that talk that I had with Alex Fajita and with Mike T. Nelson, Mike T. Nelson said something very, very important. Insulin is kind of like a master switch for your metabolism. Well, the real opponent of insulin is adrenaline. So if we think about what they do, insulin tells things to basically be anabolic. like it tells you to take little things and build big things out of them. So like taking sugar and turning it into stored glycogen, right? Taking fat out of the bloodstream and putting it in adipocytes where it's in a much safer area in a fat cell than it is in your bloodstream, right? So at this point, insulin is doing a very good job of protecting you. If you get more and more stressed out and you have an adrenaline load, adrenaline does the opposite. It tells things to break down because if your brain thinks that you're being threatened you're what you're wanting a lot of energy to be pushed out into the bloodstream and also to be broken down into the cell so you get at this point when people are very stressed out that they're breaking things down faster than they can build them back up okay so if i'm breaking down glycogen really quickly to make glucose and i'm shoving tons of glucose into the cell it's going to overwhelm the mitochondria If the mitochondria gets overwhelmed, it's going to shut down the enzymes that's going to allow things to go into the mitochondria. Then it's going to shut the cell down so you become insulin resistant. And you can become insulin resistant, and then later you can become fatty acid resistant. Now you take somebody to do bloods, and they have high triglycerides, high cholesterol, or high LDL, low HDL, high levels of inflammation, high blood sugar. This is all basically a cell danger response where you probably have too much energy trying to be pushed into the cell because you're too stressed out. So, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately when I look into the biochemistry of it, is it really a caloric toxicity that's causing the issues or is it something deeper? and one of those main regulators is going to be something called acetyl-CoA that's in your mitochondria. When it gets to a level of high, it's going to shut the mitochondria down until I don't, it's going to say I'm overwhelmed. I don't need any more of these substrates. So that's what's going to shut the cell down to stop accepting things. Well, if it shuts that down, then things like glucose and fatty acids are going to get higher in the bloodstream, which can create a level of glucotoxicity and lipotoxicity. Well, where's a really good garbage dump for those things? Fat cells. So we use fat cells as kind of a garbage disposal for excessive things like environmental toxins or like fuel substrates that can't be used initially. And I suppose the outcome of that is things like heading towards type 2 diabetes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you.

This goes back, if we circle around, of why it's so important to get a good level of aerobic fitness and get your VO2 max up. It's especially helpful for people who are getting into that metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes type of, if they're moving down the continuum towards that. If I can get someone to do the work and make more mitochondria, it's like they say, many hands make light work. If I have more mitochondria, then I can disperse that excessive amount of fuel to more workers, and I can create more energy out of that. So people, I mean, just looking at that little, because we will see that a fair bit, people coming in who are kind of flirting with type 2 diabetes, kind of on that kind of line of not quite there, but the blood sugar readings are coming in higher than they should be, pre and post-prandial, maybe waking. um you're saying potentially that like if we can like sorry generally the advice that we're getting from the nhs is go and lose weight you know go and lose weight as being the primary kind of um you know thing that's going to have a positive impact and bring the blood sugars down if you lose weight get into a calorie deficit that that's going to be enough um and certainly sometimes we're seeing that other times not necessarily seeing that being enough and And so you're saying potentially this idea of building like an aerobic base is going to be very impactful. That's going to impact massively. Like the NHS isn't wrong. Like one of the best things you can do for your health if you are overweight is to lose body fat. Like that's one of the best things you can do, right? But what are you going to tell the really skinny diabetic about that? When you have a guy who's skinny and he's type two diabetic, what the fuck is he going to lose? He doesn't have any weight to lose. got to build muscle and he's got to build mitochondria right so what you typically see is you see everything is gonna bottleneck out in at certain levels of the biochemistry and everything happens in about the same way but it can happen for different reasons I can be eating and a lot of exogenous food that can be gumming those things up or I can be in a massive calorie deficit my body tanks down my metabolism so now that alters calories and calories out just the same as not doing anything and overeating well so it's two different scenarios but realistically a lot of the same thing happening at the cellular level and then and then every couple kind of extra stresses on top of that shifting people more into that sympathetic nervous system we might be getting that impact of adrenaline on the whole process as well absolutely Absolutely. The lower your HRV is, the more prone you're going to be for having high amounts of adrenaline. The more prone you are to be reactive to things, the more prone you are to anxiety and stress, which is then going to become like a never ending cycle of self induced stress. You know, you've got to that's kind of one of the things you've got to break out of that. And to break out of that, sometimes we have to do the things that we don't like to do, especially for men. And to tell a guy he needs to do a little bit more aerobic conditioning and journal and meditate, maybe see a counselor, he's going to be like, nah, fuck off. I'm just going to go lift more weights and run hill intervals and shit like that. And that will work for a period of time, but it doesn't always work. It's not always a long-lasting solution. And it's the same thing on the side of the women. whenever you whenever a woman comes in they're typically and I'm being I'm saying all this in a very generalized manner most guys that come in are going to be hyper tense and most girls are going to be high potence and a lot of it has to do with what they've done before they've come to see you whenever most men want to change the way their physique looks what modality do they usually choose piling food in and lifting weights that's it right exactly right so here's the thing I'm piling food hypertrophy work and overeating is inherently insulin resistance promoting and it's inherently in plant inflammatory promoting and that's not a bad thing if it's balanced out but most guys will go on a nine month bulk to try to put weight on and they don't realize it's maybe it's winter time and you're wearing a lot of heavy clothing and you're not really looking at yourself naked and you look really good in close and then you get your spring hits and you're going to start your summer shred and you kind of take a an assessment of yourself in the in the mirror and you go oh my god i took that bulk a little too far so then what do they end up doing they then they super diet and they go the extreme the opposite direction so most of the guys that that we see they probably need to do more conditioning initially and a little bit less weight training not no weight training but a little bit less emphasis on that and a little bit more emphasis on the conditioning side Most women probably need to do a little less conditioning and a little bit more actual weight training Because you get a girl that comes in and, again, for anybody listening to this, I know I'm being very, I'm not trying to be misogynistic. I'm just speaking from experience. Most girls will come in and you'll say, okay, look, you're borderline very hypotense. you tell me whenever you stand up you're getting postural hypotension you're you're seeing spots and you're getting really uh you're starting to feel faint you have cold hands and feet what we're going to work on is we're probably going to work on a lot of strength training initially and not as much conditioning and then it's almost always they go oh i do strength training and you go oh cool what do you do they go oh i do body pump you're like no no no no that's no no no that's not what i mean is like uncomfortable lifting where you actually strain and you feel like you're going to poop out your spleen. Like that's, that's what I'm talking about. Because that's what's going to raise your blood pressure back up. And for the guy, and for the guys, it's like, Hey, man, your blood pressure is really high. You got stage two hypertension. I need to get that down. You're not going to be able to lift that away. We're probably going to have to do some just standard aerobic interval training or Tabatas or whatever you steady state cardio lifts, whatever. You might need to do that for a little bit of time. And then the guy looks at you goes on I'm gonna lose all my gains like well you know if you have a heart attack you're gonna lose your gains anyways if you get diabetic you lose them anyways so you might as well spend a good six to eight weeks getting into shape and then we can reassess and start working on your strength and hypertrophy at that point so yeah super interesting that's exactly it that is what that is a lot of the time what you see isn't it is yeah it's one needing to go one way and and then maybe needing to be pulled back a little bit. I want to touch on the nervous system, but I've got some questions from people that kind of submitted some questions. And I think we'll kind of touch on some of the things within those questions that the nervous system is having an impact on that we might not actually understand, you know, or we might not realize that our kind of unmanaged nervous system is having an impact on. This is one that I, well, I'll ask you the question, and then you can kind of make it or let us know about it but someone's uh messaged in and kind of said that they have been told that they've got a gluten intolerance so a food intolerance um they've done their own research and there's a bit of a split you know some people are saying gluten is this kind of toxic substance different farming techniques nowadays causing this you know um intolerance or widespread intolerance to gluten other people so not necessarily celiac but just intolerance other people are saying this doesn't exist like you know this is this is bullshit um but the person is saying that they've had a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of their diet that they don't but they're not sure they kind of think well maybe gluten isn't the problem but i am seeing a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out my diet do you have any thoughts about what might be causing that reaction to gluten and why that might be occurring well okay so you can get you can get intolerant to pretty much almost anything food wise right whether that's intolerance to dairy or whether it's intolerance to a certain vegetable or whatever so when you're under an extreme amount of chronic stress or stress for a long time we realize that the master controller for this is your hypothalamus so if you think this hypothalamus a little gland in your brain and it's it's kind of like looking around at the rest of everybody else and it's saying okay i i you here i go back i'll teach you the way i usually do because i think about it as a business think about the hypothalamus as like the ceo of a company right so what does the ceo do he looks at financial reports and predictions and he looks at history and he looks at all this stuff and he makes decisions on what everybody else needs to be doing so then if he's looking around he's saying that you know you're stressed out and you have all these issues going on he's gonna then talk to other glands in the body one of the main ones that pituitary gland and that you think about him he's kind of like the general manager of the company so he's getting advice from the CEO he's then gonna go tell all the other departments what they need to do okay so then the the pituitary will talk to the adrenals and the thyroid and testes and all these other areas and they'll tell the workers what to do and the workers are your little hormones and that type of thing so depending on what's been going on things like trauma early childhood trauma adult trauma chronic stress not sleeping enough chronically dieting yo-yo dieting overeating all these stuff things are stressors trainings are stress like everything's a stressor your brain is going to mount a response to that through a chemical signal through adrenal output of things like cortisol and it going to also have a nervous system component as well Here the thing if I bathing in stress for a long time the nervous system can then accelerate intestinal permeability by increasing activation of mast cells and histamine, which basically, for lack of a better way of saying it, punches holes in your intestines and allows for things to get into circulation that aren't supposed to be there. High levels of cortisol. Leaky gut, is that leaky gut syndrome, what people have referred to? Yeah, and, you know, depending on who you talk to, if you say leaky gut syndrome, they'll lose their minds. You know, to me, it's all a matter of semantics. Leaky gut, intestinal permeability, whatever. That basically, your things are getting in the circulation, aren't supposed to be there. Stress increases something called zonulin, which then also creates leakier cells and that type of thing. So you start getting antigens or food particles that aren't digested totally in the body. you start bacteria viruses all sorts of stuff that can get into circulation and then you mount it you mount an immune system response which increases inflammation and then the immune system starts to attack those foods so if it's somebody that maybe they've lived off of gluten for a long period of time and they've gone through some traumatic things and not sleeping a lot or maybe they were building their career and they basically ate a croissant for breakfast and a ham sandwich for lunch and a lasagna bake for dinner and they've been over consuming gluten for a long time while they're under stress, there's a good chance that they could have an immune modulated inflammatory response towards that food. So then every time they get it, they get a reaction. So yeah, there can be that, you know, there's a lot of things about gluten that nobody knows about yet. We don't know that much about the body anyways. People try to talk like we know what the hell the body's doing. Nobody knows shit, right? Modern medicine has not been around that long and we're still finding things out all the time and testing and retesting. But if you get locked into that type of brain trauma, stress, chronic stress, whatever, and then you start getting an immune system response, if you pull gluten out, you're probably going to feel a bit better. If you put it back in, you're probably going to feel a bit worse. So in that case, if you feel better without the gluten, then just avoid gluten for a while, say like six to eight weeks. Try to avoid it as much as you can and then try eating it again. And if you don't get a response to it, then genetically, you probably don't have a problem. If you've been tested, if you're not celiac, if you don't have an IBD, IBS, whatever, gluten is probably not going to be a problem. But people need to understand that anytime you overeat anything, while you're under an enormous amount of stress, you are probably going to get intolerant to that, which is why people should probably try A, a lot of stress management, and B, good food variety. Okay. So if someone does get to that point, potentially pulling that out of the diet and starting to address some of those kind of chronic stresses and then maybe thinking about reintroducing it at a later date when stress is more manageable or building those tools to manage stress and potentially there could be some reintroduction without the symptoms. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if you do a lot of reading into it, nobody knows. Is it gluten that's the problem or is it wheat that's the problem? Is corn the problem? There's all these things that can be causing inflammation. If you're overeating them, especially if your body can't recover from that, then that can cause a problem. Hell, training causes intestinal permeability. If you train in the heat, you become temporarily permeable in the intestines, especially if you're training at a high VO2 max, like what you would be doing if you're rolling a lot and competing and doing jiu-jitsu. or if you're an endurance athlete or you know if it's hot outside if like in Brisbane here it's hot most of the year and if you're training out my shed and it's 38 degrees outside and 80 percent humidity you are creating a situation where as your core body temperature goes up it does create a level of intestinal permeability and so you have to keep that in mind right so if I if I'm eating gluten breakfast lunch and dinner if I'm eating dairy and I have a dairy issue if I'm also training in the heat if i'm not getting enough sleep these are all contributing factors that would then quite possibly create an environment where you could become intolerant to a certain food the thing to do is do an elite diet for a while and then try to add it back in if you get another reaction then guess what gluten's probably not for you but i personally could not i wouldn't i i don't have any issues with gluten my issues typically with dairy when i get stressed out i get dairy issues but man if I had to go the rest of my life without dairy or gluten man what's life's not worth living shit but it's just all three groups there isn't it you know and I mean no no pizza no you know Greek yogurt and all this shit yeah like I feel I feel sorry for a lot of my friends and a lot of my colleagues that do actually have real issues like like like my one of my trainers shane he uh he celiac like he can have it like um and i just looking at that like man i wish there was something i could do to snap my finger and fix that so that he could have foods that he doesn't you know can't does he can't have his partner does not have celiac but every time she adds in gluten it jacks her up my wife Zoe every time she eats gluten it jacks her up right so if um even if you're tested and um you're shown that it's not an issue it could still potentially be an issue um and if it's bothering you that bad then just avoid it well we went on holiday to Sicily for two weeks and the amount of cannolis and ice cream and pasta and pizza we ate if I couldn't go back there, I don't know what I'd do. Cause the best. Well, you know, you, well, you hear a lot too. You hear a lot. Got guys, they'll go to Italy for a, for a holiday and they'll eat pizza and bread and all this and they'll go, Oh, I didn't have a single issue eating gluten and wheat and all that stuff in Italy. They must just have different wheat than we have here. But then they go to the, then they go to Sainsbury or they go wherever and they, they buy pasta, you know, that was in Italy. and they have a reaction to it. Like it hasn't probably has less to do with the pasta and the bread and all of that. It probably has more to do with the environment you're putting yourself into, which is I'm stressed out all the time. My tolerance to things are going to go down. If I go on holiday and the stress goes down, all of a sudden my tolerance goes up. Interesting. Yeah. Super interesting, isn't it? Just that little example is amazing. Yeah. Stress control stress. Your brain controls everything. when I lived in Texas I would I would tell clients to go on holiday you'd have I'd have a business owner that hadn't had a holiday in 10 years and they're not they're getting zero results even though they're being great on everything I'm like listen I want you to take two weeks and I want you to go to Mexico and I want you to sit on the beach and I want you to drink beer and eat burritos I don't give a shit what you do I just I don't want you to diet or train and they would lose weight they'd come back and they'd be like okay i got it i just need to drink beer and eat mexican food all day that's the solution it's like no the solution is to put your body in the environment that you had mexico which is you need to start taking more time for yourself and de-stressing because that's ultimately what's controlling your digestive issues so just on that so no sorry so looking at the gut let's just go back to the gut health so i've got another question about gut health it's about kind of about poo so I know you'll like this question someone said given on a day-to-day basis their diet dietary intake may change they've eaten different things every day how do they know like sorry given on a day-to-day base their dietary intake may change their poop basically every day because they're doing different things how do they know whether they've managed to kind of maintain optimal gut health if they're really trying to kind of keep their gut nice and healthy what markers are they looking for if that kind of poop is changing day to day i mean yeah if your poop is changing day to day the best thing to do is keep a food log and just kind of saying okay if i wake up and and i'm basically spackling my toilet with diarrhea what did i eat the day before because that's probably what's going to be the the issue and you know gut health can get pretty pretty deep and intense and it's another one of those things we We know a little bit about a very complex system in the body. So what I'll typically tell people to do is if you want to eliminate all doubt, go do a stool analysis test, do a CDSA and see what's going on with your gut, right? Because you could have some type of imbalance that when you eat certain things, certain bacteria will react in a certain manner. So like I was actually, I normally don't run tests for people. I normally try to fix things before I order an expensive test, right? Because a lot of cases, a lot of the gut stuff, the same treatments help pretty much everything. But I would rather spend money on better lifestyle stuff and maybe some certain specific supplementation protocols. See if that alleviates a lot of it. If it doesn't, then we're on a stool analysis. But one of my clients here in Australia, he's a pharmacist. So he has access to all these tests. and he was doing fantastically well he went to croatia um did like a boats and hoes type thing that they do out there i don't know went partying and all that and went to amsterdam came home and then all of a sudden like he was having all these massive issues with a bloat and gas and like he's got a six-pack but his guts are blown out diarrhea all this we can't figure out what it is i'm like all right just run a cdsa and his his he has massive fungal overgrowth there's a bunch bacteria that's really off like opportunistic bacteria that's really off and so in a situation where it's extreme like that

then the best case thing to do is find somebody that can order you the right tests and then run a protocol that's going to be very direct. Like for him, because he's the pharmacist, very easy for us to pick a good pharmaceutical antifungal, a good pharmaceutical antibacterial, and then also layer on top of that a lot of holistic type natural things for maintenance. But if you don't have a good doctor that understands this type of stuff, then your best case scenario is keep a very diligent food log and then see how you react to different foods and see if eliminating those foods helps with the issue. And then taking those metrics, take your stress metrics. Are you sleeping well? Do you feel well rested? Do you have bags under your eyes? Do you have darkening under your eyes? Those are all symptoms. Do you have any type of fungal issues anywhere else? Athlete's foot, vaginal thrush, oral thrush, itchy bum hole, fingernail fungus. Like these are all symptoms that you might have an issue where your gut bacteria has gotten a little bit out of balance. So yeah, so like you say, in the absence of the kind of expensive tests, an elimination diet with a good kind of tracking protocol in terms of physical and or your subjective experiences and how you're appearing and then starting to reintroduce things would be a great way of kind of zeroing in on potential issues yeah for me that's kind of the first line therapy right let's see let's see if it if it's the food or if it's the environment so if i say So like the easiest thing to do is just take a piece of paper out and draw a line down the middle of it, put a yes on one side and a no on the other. Now, on the no side, you write down all the common things that you eat every week. You're not going to eat those for like three or four weeks. Okay, so let's say like most people, eggs, chicken, beef. That'll be like their top three proteins that they eat. Then for a lot of people, it might be green beans or, you know, you write down peas or you write down all the stuff you normally eat. we're not going to eat that stuff for like a month, maybe a month and a half, and let's try something different. Like instead of chicken, let's have turkey. Instead of beef, let's have bison. Let's eat some more, maybe some more fish and seafood, things like that, and see if that resolves the problem. If that resolves the problem, then we know it was the food creating the problem, and an elimination diet is probably going to be good to do for a good two months and then reintroduce foods one at a time. If they do an elimination diet and it doesn't get significantly better, then there's probably some type of pathology in their gut and possibly an issue between their gut and their brain. At that point, they need to be referred out to speak to somebody who can actually do the right testing to see what's going on in the gut. Do I need an antifungal? Do I need an antibacterial? Do I need both? Which is usually the case. If you've got a fungal issue, you'll usually almost always have a bacterial issue as well. And I think one of the reasons that is, is because if you have long-term chronic stress, that's going to cause an over-activation of your immune system. Cortisol goes up to bring the immune system back down and kind of put it back under control. And once it does that, it tends to suppress your immune system, which then allows your gut to get dysbiotic. But, you know, as far as what you can do for yourself, the elimination diet, maybe looking at, if you wanted to play around with some antimicrobials like black walnut, berberine. If you wanted to look at something like olive oregano, if you want to look at like rosemary oil, like look at some volatile oils, then look at some antimicrobials. That stuff can go, you can try that for a few weeks to also see if that helps. If it doesn't, or you feel worse, then it's definitely time to get referred out and go see a doctor. Poop in a little bucket, they go and they analyze it, and then they'll tell you exactly what's in there and then you'd be a very specific on how to treat that okay that's good so another question I had was going back to kind of another question that got sent to me there's a couple of questions around that kind of someone who's flirting with type 2 diabetes so they've been having some high blood sugar readings and they were looking at ways of managing that so they were looking at potentially the best supplements or minerals or foods to help reduce or bring down blood sugars? Okay. All right. So let's start with food because everything should be food-based and supplement secondary. So we'll talk food and training. Number one, get your aerobic work in. I'm telling you, man, that's going to be the best thing. Number one is that. Number two is obviously resistance training. The majority of where you hold glycogen, the biggest depot is going to be in type 2X fibers. So you're going to want to lift with, you're not, you don't want to lift with heavy weights but you do want to lift technical failure Okay So lifting in like bodybuilder rep ranges so if we looking at like hypertrophy rep ranges strength endurance rep ranges and making sure that you take it down to where you getting it like one ugly rep and you done like the minute you get one ugly rep that's the end you've pretty much fatigued everything you need to if i can grow more type 2x fiber and type 2a fiber glycogen right so that that will be helpful. If I'm also doing some of the higher rep stuff, like the hypertrophy and the strength endurance stuff, and if I'm doing some aerobic training, then that's going to build more mitochondria that allows me to manage that flow of energy through the cell and through the mitochondria. So that's going to be helpful. The third thing is sleep. A lot of people that I see that are having issues, especially with metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes, they are not prioritizing sleep. If you don't sleep, your blood sugar rises, right? And then it makes you basically insulin resistant the rest of the day. Making sure you're doing simple lifestyle stuff, like walking more, like not worrying about hitting like 20,000 steps a day. But you know, if you're, if you're, if you're in London, and you're one tube station away, and it's a 15 minute walk to that tube station, get off early and walk the 15 minutes and just try to try to do simple stuff like that part further away from things that easy, easy stuff. And then looking at things like, you know if you're if you're sitting at home and you're not doing anything and you're watching you know netflix sit on the floor and do some nice light stretching just do some static stretching you know what what we really need to do more of to be able to get more glucose into the cell and get it out of the bloodstream is we need more muscular contraction okay so that doesn't necessarily mean lifting weights more all you need is to contract the muscle when you contract the muscle, you become glucose sensitive. And that's, that is different than insulin sensitive. So even if I'm, if I'm like, after we get off this, I'm going to go watch the new episodes of The Last Dance. And what I can do, I've been sitting at a desk all day working. So what I can do while I'm there is I can just flex muscles for 20 or 30 or 40 seconds. And that's enough contraction to make your body, your cells more glucose sensitive. That's really easy stuff people can do at a desk when they're at work and no one even knows you're doing it. Stretching is the same thing. If I go into a deep static stretch, the muscles are contracting to protect joints. Okay, if I can hold that, that makes me more glucose sensitive. So the more stuff I can do to become glucose sensitive and to burn through energy and to build more mitochondria, the easier it's going to be to regulate my blood sugar. So is that a good thing to do before eating, doing like a body scan of contract and relax or some stretching before a meal absolutely absolutely and that's that's also the case to to train multiple times a day and when i say multiple times a day i'm not meaning like going in and you know maybe working up to one rep max in the morning and then going back in the afternoon and doing functional life perch v and then coming back in the evening and doing like giant sets what i'm saying is like wake up when you wake up in the morning okay wake up have your cup of coffee, have a pee and a poo, and then do like 10 minutes of stretching or do 10 minutes of yoga, do 10 minutes of sun salutation, do 10 minutes of sprawls, just something to get the body moving. Okay, then at lunch, maybe you're contracting all your muscles, you go out for a quick 10, brisk 10 minute walk before you eat that type of thing. When then, you know, in the evening, you go and you hit your training, and then you make sure you, you know, get a good night's sleep. I mean, it's really the, it's the simple stuff that's screwing people up. It's, it's not the, it's not what they're doing dedicated in the gym. It's what they're not doing outside of the gym. And I had this, I had a long talk with, um, I've got like some herniated lumbar discs right now. And so the physiotherapist I see, he works on the nervous system. Then he works on the mechanical side. And so you're going to kind of see a theme going forward in all of the industries. We've got to work on the brain and the nervous system then we can work on the muscles the mechanics and so we had this uh a big talk about look you know we can fix you like i can fix you with programming he can fix you with the physio but if you go home and you sit at your desk the same way you've been that's going to negate all the all the hard work you've been doing so it's the little basic everyday things that screw a lot of people up but i think maybe having a little bit of knowledge some people would say so if we just say just go for a walk it's going to help your type you know borderline type two it's like well that's not going to help why is that going to help you know a little bit of knowledge around the kind of you know what's happening on a cellular level suddenly it's like oh okay i can see how that actually is going to help let's do that it's like we it's like we talked about earlier like sometimes you got to take a couple of steps back and sometimes you got to slow down before you go faster and so in order to get somebody to buy into that you have to explain you know what the benefit it all a sales process I need you to do this because it going to benefit you in a certain way Now, as far as supplements are concerned, like if you're not taking a multivitamin, multimineral, then you don't need to worry about anything else because that should be the base of everything. You know, something that has a good amount of B vitamins in it and the right forms of B vitamins. like spin if you're gonna buy a vitamin buy a very good vitamin don't buy bullshit vitamin right there's no point because then it becomes an anti-nutrient but you need a lot of B vitamins in your biochemistry you need a lot of magnesium need a lot of zinc need copper and the manganese there's a lot of things that you need that you're probably not going to be getting enough of in your food at least not optimal values you might be hitting the RDA but hitting an optimal level is going to be a completely different story. And you're always going to be bottlenecked at what co-factors you have to drive those processes. So if I don't have enough of certain B vitamins, certain things aren't going to work as fast as they're supposed to, right? So that would be my first thing. The second thing is to stay away from glucose disposal agents, because a lot of people will take glucose disposal agents because what they're doing is they're just trying to lower the number on their glucometer. What they're not understanding is, yes, initially that will lower the number on the glucometer. If you're waking up and you're at eight millimoles on your glucometer and you take a glucose disposal agent, yeah, it might drop down to 6.5 in a few weeks. The problem that you're not understanding is you're shoving glucose into a cell that doesn't want it for some specific reason. It makes more sense to build more mitochondria first. Then if you need a glucose disposal agent, knock yourself out. If you're going to take anything, especially with high fasting blood sugar, you're probably going to want to take something like berberine. Okay. Because one of the, one of the main things that berberine does is it, it dampens down your liver's ability to manufacture glucose. And that, because that's really where you're getting the glucose from is high adrenaline is going to crank up gluconeogenesis. Your liver is going to start making a lot of glucose. Now you wake up, you've got really high levels of glucose. There's one point where you need to get that into the cell, but there's another point where you need to get the liver to stop making so much of it. And that's why doctors will put people on metformin because one of the main actions, other than just making you more insulin sensitive, it also pushes down the liver's ability to make glucose. So then it makes your glucose look a lot better but again that stuff for those are band-aids those aren't long-term solutions right we still have to take care of the getting more fit and getting more healthy on the side too so you touched on it but the same another question from the the same uh chap was um he's been having high waking um blood sugars but pre and post prandial generally now are after starting to input some aerobic conditioning and it's like calorie deficit bringing carbohydrates down and a lot of the things that are being recommended the daytime readings tend to be okay but the morning reading is always pretty much over where it should be yeah so some of the stuff some of the tactics we'll use with that is we might give somebody 500 to a thousand milligrams of berberine before bed okay so we might do that we also might we also might do a sleep assessment and say okay Are you waking up a lot? Are you waking up to pee a lot at night? Typically they'll say yes. Okay. So just so that we have the foundational fundamental stuff down, how are your sleeping arrangements? Do you, is it completely dark in your room? Is it cold enough in your room? Does your partner sleep with you and they have weird sleeping habits and that's keeping up? Do you sleep with dogs? Like that's like, like I, my, my wife and I actually have separate, separate bedrooms and the reason we have separate bedrooms and and we'll spend the night with each other a couple of nights a week but the majority of the time we don't because she loves to sleep with the dogs then the dogs screw my sleep up and and Zoe you could drop Zoe in a middle of a war zone bombs going off and she could sleep but I can't yeah so I want her to be able to sleep with the dogs because she enjoys that but I also want to get good sleep so I sleep in a separate bedroom. So those are things you got to talk about it. Is there any light coming in from a street lamp or something like that? Maybe we get you some blackout curtains. Maybe are you in the middle of town? There's a lot of noise. Maybe get a white noise machine or play white noise stuff on your cell phone. You want to make sure that there's taking care of the sleep. Because like I said earlier, if you're not sleeping well and sleeping soundly, your blood sugar is going to be artificially raised. So if we correct the sleeping habits, then we can take some berberine and then we might actually have a meal a couple hours before bed to make sure we have ample amounts of liver glycogen So we might do something like a little bit of honey with a little bit of sodium So that will quickly replenish liver glycogen. The sodium will help keep you from having to wake up to pee at night. And then we'll also mix that in with maybe a little bit of Greek yogurt, because there's been some pretty good studies showing that casein protein before bed creates an environment for you to be anti catabolic while you sleep so that makes a really nice yummy treat for people if they have like a bowl like a cup of berries with some Greek yogurt maybe drizzle some honey on top and throw a little bit of sea salt on that mix it up and have that at the end of the day before you go to bed and then there's some men there's some other things too like you know there could be issues of serotonin and melatonin when people are very stressed out and anxious when you're very stressed out and your body's breaking energy down rapidly it consumes a lot of activated b3 so there's a system that creates more of that activated b3 where you still trip the fan away from the brain to make that if you can't get tripped the fan into the brain you're not making enough serotonin you don't make it of serotonin you're not gonna make melatonin so in a lot of cases too we'll give someone a small amount of melatonin to see if that helps and if it does then we'll probably do is work on if they're not on an SSRI or not on to any type of antidepressant we might give them a little bit of b6 and 5-htp and see if that helps and then that usually takes care of a lot of things there's a lot of different angles you can go on to to get somebody to sleep better which almost always is going to lower their fasting glucose if it doesn't in a lot of cases I find a lower carb diet a lower carb approach works pretty well too as long as they're not in a massive calorie deficit sure so actually not coupling the two calorie deficit and low carb maybe having one or the other yeah so maybe beefing up the protein quite a bit um beef up the protein quite a bit making sure you're having adequate amounts of uh of good good quality fatty acids and then when i say low carb i'm not talking like going straight keto right um i'm talking like low carb for you and your activity so like low carb for me is 125 grams a day when I'm doing jitsu low-carb for me is like 500 a day right you know when you're trying to like 15 hours a week plus conditioning and a little bit weight training you're gonna need it right but for somebody who's really overweight there's no real inherent need for carbohydrates whatsoever other than probably fiber and some fiber nutrients so if they're really overweight we'll probably take them down to a fairly low carb and put more on a ketogenic style diet for a small period of time because that way they don't get those reactive hypoglycemia issues and then we're looking back at that kind of metabolic flexibility and improving people's use of different substrates especially exactly and once they lose a good amount of weight they lose a good amount of inflammation from that fat loss then eventually their carbs start to go up because they're going to need those because the performance goes up and their body wants more carbs okay look that we've we've covered so much different stuff it's gonna be so such i knew it was going to be like this from the course but we've just covered so much stuff it's so interesting i don't want to take up too much of your time so i'm sure you've got stuff stuff planned but i'll ask you a couple more questions just to finish off so we've actually already covered this in massive detail but just as probably a little bit of a summary for the whole podcast really is I tend to ask people what are their three best tips for people for improving or optimizing their health and performance so we've obviously already covered a lot of it but just as a little soundbite what are your three best tips for improving health and performance I think one thing is that to not put all your eggs in one basket like don't don't be married to a method or an idea and don't don't you know don't be married to your passion either because passion can really mess you up and there's a book i highly recommend people um if you if you know if you if you like to read and if you like to read especially fantasy i'm a big fantasy and sci-fi fans like dude and other books and i i tend to read what i find is a lot of sci-fi and fantasy it tells a story but there's also lessons that you could learn from the characters and things and so there's a book called wizards first rule um and in it there's 13 wizards rules that every wizard kind of lives by and one of them is the rule is passion rules reason so if i get and the whole the whole concept of the book is that reason should always be the cornerstone of all your decisions like it either makes sense or it doesn't and don't allow your passion to override your sense of reason that way you don't do dumb shit so you know i love to lift heavy i love

squat but right now I've got lower lumbar herniations I can't squat I have to do step ups and split squats I have to work around it as much as I want to doing too much squatting and and ignoring the niggles is what got me to a point where now I can't squat so or I'm having to like relearn how to squat so never tip number one is never let your passion destroy your performance and health. Point number two is make sure that you're getting information from multiple places. Like don't just sit in an echo chamber and get your information from just the people who you think are the experts. Don't appeal to authority. You see that a lot, especially in the evidence based crowd is just because somebody's name is on a bunch of research articles, it doesn't mean they have a good grasp on reality because what happens in a lab is usually very, very different than what happens in real life. Um, especially when you put like, when you put humans brains and what they're going to do and what, you know, how they're going to, um, act outside of a lab. So making sure that you're learning and getting information from as many places as you can on how to control your health and making sure that the shit makes sense. Right. It's just, it's like we say with the NHS, you know, God bless the NHS. But, you know, sometimes doctors, doctors don't do what we do. And we don't do what doctors do. So sometimes they're not the best people to get advice on nutrition and lifting and conditioning and training on because they're not taught that stuff. Right? So you don't want to just because a doctor says something doesn't mean that that's the way it needs to be. And you got to put everything else in context, just like if I've got an overweight diabetic losing weight losing that first 10% and then every 10% they lose is gonna massively increase their health but what do I tell the guy who not at that level yet he just got type 2 diabetes and he really skinny because he lost all his muscle mass like I can tell him to lose weight so I want to make sure I got multiple inputs of where I'm getting my information from so that I can I can give both of those people their their independent prescription that's gonna be based for them specifically the third one is just just fucking move more man Jesus like if you come in and you train with a trainer three days a week that is not your only exercise like don't don't go train with your trainer for three sessions a week and give yourself a good pat on the back and be like okay I'm done for the week well there's another 165 hours a week right you need to be getting a good quality sleep you need to make sure you're moving more if you sit at a desk like I do all day get up get up every hour and a half two hours and go for a 20-minute walk like and think about doing taking care of the simple shit before you think about taking care of the complex shit you know if you don't know how to eat you're you're you don't know how to diet then stick to what we know works eat a lot of veggies garnish it with meat you know make sure you drink a lot of fluids that's pretty much as basic as it gets right so don't don't get confused and razzle dazzle take care of the fundamental things before you decide to get crazy and do the hoodoo voodoo complex things great advice yeah brilliant advice you know you can't can't beat that really isn't it it's just taking them back to basics for people you know so that they're not um trying to like go down that wormhole of finding a specific nutrient that's going to cure all my ills and it's like well let's just do what you need to do first you know hit those basic like kind of things that we need to be hitting and then we can think about those more kind of in-depth aspects of kind of health and nutrition everyone wants to know what the secret is and I can tell you I know what the secret is I can tell you exactly what the secret is Be very consistent patient and do it for a long fucking time Consistency is the secret Being very compliant staying on track and doing that for a very long time is always the best long solution Amazing. So, Luke, where can people get hold of you? If people want to work with you, other coaches want to work with you, or clients want to get hold of you and kind of work with you guys, how can they get hold of you? Yeah, so they can email us at info at musclenerds.net. we've also got our instagram which is muscle nerds underscore health we're also on facebook just look up muscle nerds so any of those avenues if if like coaches want to learn this stuff like what you learn in the the foundation stuff the program design we've got a couple of other things we do we do mentorships like long-term mentorships um online training we do all that stuff and pretty soon we'll have a gym hopefully to train at this might if we don't open the gyms in Australia pretty soon this might be the first the the fastest purchase and bankruptcy of a gym ever so oh god I hope not me too all right look it's been great having you on and I know anyone listening to this would have got a hell of a lot out of this you know and be able to take some actual points away to their training and their life and their wellness so really appreciate you coming on and hopefully we'll be able to have you back because I've got a list of subjects that we just touched on that I think we could just do a whole whole podcast about them themselves so really appreciate you coming on man well I appreciate you having me on anytime you want to do it just uh just let me know I'm happy to get on will do thank you okay guys wow what uh what an amazing interview um I'm just thrilled to be able to kind of pick Luke's brains about those different subjects I mean we covered a lot of different subjects from kind of how to train you know athletes to be well conditioned for their sport to gut health to you know training for health and well we we covered a lot of different stuff there so i hope there are some takeaways that you can start actioning and putting into your your lifestyle and your training and i hope there's some good stuff in there that's going to help you um you know fire me any questions you've got about anything that we spoke about um and get in contact with luke and the muscle nerds guys if you want their support because they are really some of the top guys in the industry at moment um look get over to the to our website sign up to the performance hub as well because there's a lot of information on there in the kind of ballparks that we discussed today so if you're looking for more content around these subjects the performance hub is a great place to go to start reading more and learning more about these subjects we're also going to be running some challenges on the performance hub so we're going to have everything that you need to start training and living towards a healthier lifestyle, laying those baseline qualities of aerobic fitness and movement quality that we spoke in depth about today. We're gonna have a whole guide and a whole kind of setup challenge, if you like, on the members site. So keep your eyes out for that. It's gonna be our survive to thrive challenge. It's gonna be for guys and girls who are looking to take their training to the next level by laying the baseline qualities that you need, those foundational qualities of aerobic capacity, of good movement quality, of maintaining and supporting your well-being, your mental well-being, as well as your physical well-being. So keep your eyes out for that challenge because it's going to be really great and it's going to be coming in the next few weeks. Yeah, go and hit up Luke on his socials. Hit us up on our socials. If you can comment, like and share on these podcasts, it really helps us to be able to get great guests like Luke and stay tuned because we've got some really great guests coming up next week we've got a real big guest so so keep an eye on our social for that one and we'll see you next time