Least Mode vs. Beast Mode Philosophy

One of the terms that has sort of come out of muscle nerds is a least mode. Talk us through that. The comparison between least mode and beast mode. Well, you know, years ago I was talking to my friend, Zach Trowbridge. He's a coach in Chicago. And we were laughing at these, all these Instagram guys that were talking about how they're beast moding the workout, they're going to war. And they were saying all the typical hashtag bullshit people say. And we were laughing at him going, man, that guy or that girl doesn't know what beast mode is. They train like a pussy. They don't really understand what that is. And so Zach said something. He goes, it looks more like they're doing some least mode, not beast mode. And I went, oh, my God. So I banked that word in the back of my mind. And when I got out of the Republican group, I was thinking, what is not working for people? And what wasn't working was we were teaching people how to train Olympic athletes and pro athletes. And then you're going to your gym and you're trying to train a 45-year-old soccer mom of three that has better shit to do than train seven days a week with German volume training. Those people, they're already beasting out their life. And I thought, well, if they're already beasting out their life and they've got all that stress, why would we then destroy them in the gym? You know, it just seemed to me to be so unnecessary. And I figured, you know, dealing with all the physique girls that I deal with where you guys know how it is. Girls come to the industry they come to comp prep all the time and they say I want to do this competition just because it you know in their town And they not even close to being mentally or physically ready to do a contest prep but they do it anyways And then they blow up after their show and now they can't get the weight off no matter what they do, you know. So we started thinking about, you know, there's not that much difference between the competitors and general population. Stress is stress. So the problem was all of them had unmitigated chronic stress. They weren't doing anything to combat that. And I said, okay, if we look at like sprinting and lots of volume and lots of intensity and dieting being on one side, being the beast mode concept, well, everything in the body works on a continuum. So if we look at what's the natural opposite of that is, you know, cutting volume down, cutting intensity down, more aerobic work instead of anaerobic work, more food instead of less food, more massage and yoga and, you know, all that kumbaya, yin bullshit that people love to do and chanting and shit like that. smoking weed or whatever the people do to calm themselves down. You know, you have to have everything in life has an equal and opposite balance, right? So yin versus yang, day, man versus female. You can't really say that anymore in America because there's like 69 different genders. But in the natural order of things, there's a plus and a negative. And that's the way that our universe, we know it works. So it just makes sense that if we think about how people are beasting out their lives, you'd want to have something that could counteract that. So your training should be something that increases stress resilience, not pushes you further into that stress response. So why not pull people out and give them less volume and intensity, give them more stretching and yoga, more aerobic type work, more food and do the exact opposite, balance them out for a few months, which is what we call prepping to prep, then beast them when you have them in a good physiological condition and a good mental state to actually do a photo shoot or transformation or um or like a contest you know