Cortisol, cardio & complexities of fat loss (Part 3)

# Cortisol, cardio & complexities of fat loss (Part 3)

**Channel:** Ruby Cherie
**Published:** 2025-01-24
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=dgnMmZDSS94

And this one we took, where does cardio fit in? Is cortisol the issue? Where does HIIT training fit in? And how to actually create a program to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, regardless of how much body fat you have to lose or where you're starting. This one is going to help you out. Don't get fucked up by themselves. So if you have a fucked up gut, you probably have a nervous system issue. You could have a hormonal issue. You could have a brain issue. You could have an early childhood trauma issue. You could have a lifestyle issue and a sleep issue. There are all these things that are feeding into this. You don't just get a fucked up gut, right? You don't just get poor insulin management. You don't just get fucked up cortisol response. response. Like this stuff doesn't happen in isolation. It happens as part of a huge matrix. So these people that are trying to tell you that their, their puzzle piece is the one thing that's going to fix you. They're all full of shit because there's a bunch of puzzle pieces that need to be put in that puzzle to make things more clear. So what people need to do is, and I'll say this, probably the number one thing that's holding people back has nothing to do with a hormone, has nothing to do with their gut. It has to do with themselves. People are the ones that are holding themselves back because they won't get their shit together. They won't do what they need to do. They won't make a complete lifestyle change. They skip workouts. They fuck up on their diet. They try to jump in and do stuff too aggressively instead of easing into it. They get bad advice. And then they don't have patience. So if they haven't seen the effects in three days, they They switch to something else. And then in three days, they switch to something else in three. So now it's like I've tried everything. You've tried 24 different things for three days each. How about you try something for six months and then don't just throw it in the trash. Try to figure out what part of that's working, what part's not. And just stop doing the stuff that's not working. Keep doing the stuff that's working. And then layer something else on top of that. It's insanity. Like I've got I have people who are obese, like morbidly obese, and they're like, I just can't lose weight. All right. I'll put them on a three day fast water fast with a little bit of fish oil and a multivitamin. They lose a heap of weight. I'm like, I thought you couldn't lose weight. Well, it's because I didn't eat anything. Well, so you're saying a deficit works. Yeah. I'm like, OK, so now we don't need to do 100 percent deficit. Can we do a 25 to 30 percent deficit and make sure you don't miss your training sessions? and just understand that it's going to just take a little bit of time. But I've shown you that a deficit makes you lose weight. So now you just have to have that deficit over an extended period of time to lose the hundred fucking kilos of food that you've eaten in the past that you couldn't get rid of that's now stored on your body. I have something amazing to say after this podcast, but that part that you just said there, I completely had a little laughing moment because this is what I've been telling all my girls this week because my coach put me onto, I'm seeing, like, I have a coach who's a psychologist. And anyway, I'm reading The Mountain Is You. It's funny, there is no mountain. The mountain is you. You are the one that's stopping yourself. And it is so true. Like, it is the best book. Anyone listening to this, please get the book. But we are always our own mountain. And that is what I wanted to get at with this. We are always the ones stopping ourselves. Regardless, I will always say, our job as a coach is to stop you doing dumb shit and it's not that it's dumb shit because it's not your fault you just you're scared of eating more food so then as soon as you start to eat more food you panic the pants get tight whatever it is and then you second guess everything then put yourself back into a deficit and then you end up spinning your wheels like you're stopping yourself Ali was stopping herself everyone stops themselves until they had enough and they finally just go all in and as soon as you go all in i started the podcast off with this luke and i know that you're going to get results if you follow what we tell you to do but it's just that most of us you have to follow it you have to actually do it literally like consistently and the thing is like people need to understand you're either in or you're out like you if you want to get the results that we tell you you can get you're either fully in or you're fully out if you're halfway in, you're going to get halfway results. So you have to make a decision whether you're ready to be fully committed or not. So if you get fully committed, we're good. If you want to be half committed, that's okay. But just understand that our timeline has now exponentially increased. You'll agree. Am I a nice coach or am I a pretty, I'm a, I'm a dick. I can be a real dick to my clients. There's a difference between being nice and kind. You are at it, but you're kind because if it wasn for you i would not be where i am if it wasn for you many people wouldn be where they are but that because you call us out on our shit And that being kind And most people aren even kind to themselves They fool themselves into these very things It exactly what you said And that's the thing. And the reason I'm asking you this, because like to me, I'm a coach. I'm an old school coach. Like when I was in when I was playing sports growing up, they called you names. They kicked you in the ass. They weren't nice, but they did it because they wanted to win and because they cared about your performance. They cared about you. like they cared about you right so that's the way i've always been coached when i was an athlete so that's the way i coach so i'll be someone's biggest cheerleader when they do the right thing and i'll be fully invested with you if you're doing the right thing but if you're fucking around i'm not that interested anymore and i'm gonna tell you to get your shit together and i had a client yesterday he uh he's you know i've trained him for i don't know four or five years a long fucking time and he's just never gotten as lean as he wants to get but he also he fucks around he doesn't hit all his training sessions. He doesn't train as hard as he should. He, you know, he's trying to find quick fixes. He doesn't sleep enough. He takes on too much work. He's stressed out all the time. He drinks a little bit too much. He's never, ever followed a diet consistently in the time that I've trained him. And so it's, it's about, you know, once a year he comes around and says, Hey, can we really get on the nutrition? And I'm like, are you, are you finally, if I, I'm going to write all this stuff out and I'm going to orchestrate it. Are you finally going to follow your nutrition? Coach, I'm going to do it this time. And I'm like, no, you're not. I'm like, bro, this is like the 12th time we've gone through this. Are you actually going to do it this time? But he has this understanding that he's basically the captain of his own ship, and I'm just the navigator. So I'm going to tell him where to go. But if he doesn't steer the fucking ship the right way, we're probably going to run up on the reef. And so I try to coach everybody that way and saying, look, if you just follow the map and don't do any detours, we're going to get there. But if the more detours you take, the longer this is going to happen. And he goes, oh, I just feel like my arms and my shoulders, they're just real soft. That doesn't even look like a lift. I'm like, yeah, because you're fat. And he's like, holy shit. I'm like, no, I mean, let's just say what it is. If you want me to be politically correct, I'll just say, OK, well, you're still fairly gravitationally challenged. right but let's just let's just call a spade a spade you're still fat you're not gonna have muscle tone because you're still fat and you miss your sessions and you don't eat enough to fill your muscles out and you don't sleep enough to recover so you're inflamed but it's like the the kind of the whole the whole point to this is that you know if you follow and do what you say you're gonna do with the program you're gonna see the results but you also have to have patience and understand that you're going to have to do this for a significant period of time if you want to see success yeah like he he loses 10 kilos i'm like i'm fucking stoked for you he goes my arms still look bad my shoulders look bad yeah because you're still fat you still have probably another fucking 20 kilos to lose right like i'm going to cheerlead for you but i'm also going to be i'm also going to slap you in the face with a little bit of reality you got a lot more fat to lose than you think you do i love this we're going to touch on that part very soon but i like that you just said you don't eat enough you can't starve fat loss you need to feel fat loss which is no you can you can no you can you can start you can start no you can start fat loss but you're going to lose muscle too yeah if i said weight loss there's a difference yeah but but we also say like you if you weight loss you're going to lose fat fat loss you're going to lose fat now the difference is are you going to retain that muscle so that's a big difference right because we'll look at all the the people taking all the GLP-1 drugs now, like Ozempic, Trazapine, all that stuff, there's a lot of information about how it causes muscle wasting. Yeah, it does cause muscle wasting. Why? Because people don't eat enough protein and they starve themselves because the drugs, the whole point of the drug, like the main emphasis for this classification of drugs is to make you not hungry. So then people just don't eat. Basically, they put themselves in a caloric deficit. They lose tremendous amounts of weight. But the problem is when they don't eat, they also don't have protein and they don't train. And so they reckon, you know, 25 to 35% of what they're losing is muscle. And like you said before, muscle is precious. Muscle takes a long time to build. You don't want to lose that when you're dieting. So the thing is like, yeah, you can starve yourself and you'll lose a heap of fat, but you're also going to lose a heap of muscle, which means your body composition is not going to look any better. So if you look at, do you remember, did you guys over here, you got lots of Subways here. Did you ever have that Subway commercial with Jared? Like the Jared guy who ate one, he ate one foot long Subway sandwich every day and he lost like 250 pounds. But the thing is, I don't want you to say no. If anybody, anybody would remember this, it's like basically he only ate Subway like one Subway sandwich a day or something And he went from like 350 pounds like 150 He lost a tremendous amount of weight just starving himself but he didn't look any different. He went from being just big, obesely fat to small and fat. He didn't look better. He didn't look like he felt better. And now he's in prison because he was- Say that part again, please. Please say that part again. He didn't look any different. He just shrunk. This is the reality for most women, and that's why I love what you just said, because you can't just starve yourself into a better body composition. You cannot starve yourself into a better – I should have said you need to fuel – you need to fuel body composition. That's a better way of saying it. You can't starve yourself to good body composition. You can starve yourself for lots of fat loss. you can starve yourself for weight loss. But keep in mind when you do that, especially when you're not training hard, you're going to lose a lot of muscle. So your body composition is either going to stay the same or it's going to get worse. And all you're going to see is that you've lost a ton of fat muscle and you have seen the scale go down, but then you're going to look at yourself. You're going to get out of the shower and look at yourself in the mirror and go, God, I look terrible. I look terrible. I look like a coat hanger. And you also said that significant period of time, you'll thank yourself and yeah trying to find quick fixes is the easiest thing to do because it just takes so long and it's annoying i know but you're gonna thank yourself later and you also said half-assed results like you need to be all in you can't want all in results if you're only going half-assed so if you're only willing to go this much as in like halfway or whatever way you're willing to go then you just need to adjust your expectations and take a step back because that is when you start spinning your wheels, wondering why you're not getting results. And then you blame the program, blame the coach, whatever it is. It's like, no, you just need to readjust your expectations and get like, just start with where you're at. There's nothing wrong with that. You just need to know where you are. There's an epidemic going on right now that's super visual for people to see. Go look at all the Hollywood celebrities that are looking horrible because they're all getting on Ozempic. They're all getting on GLP-1 drugs. They're all got in the face. They've all lost all this muscle. Their clothes are hanging off of them. And everybody's going, what the hell is going on? They're all taking these drugs and they're trying to do it really quickly the wrong way. And then they look terrible. Yeah, they've lost heaps of weight, but they look awful. And that is not like that's not what people come to us to look like. If you want to look like that, cool. Go to your doctor and get some fucking Zepic. I'm not coaching you because I don't believe in that. thank you can people please just stop defaulting a fat loss 24 7 like honestly this goes back to periodize your fat loss phase and then do them when you can effectively lose that well i would also say look there's nothing inherently wrong with just folks on fat loss but if you're going to do it for an extended period of time you want to focus it's slow fat loss it's basically you're looking for a recomp which means that you're going to go on a smaller deficit not starve yourself but just go under eat a little tiny bit, you still going to have plenty of plenty of fuel to train what you're going to do. I would say there for small females, that isn't really a great idea. I was about to say that the problem is, and it goes back to that post that, uh, that we put up, I think we put up last week. It was a re repost women. That's again, women have it rough because let's say if i'm again 3200 tdee and i do a 500 calorie deficit i can easily lose 400 grams a weight a week no problem if you're a small female and your tdee is 1700 and you pull that same 500 off to try to lose that same 4 450 grams a week you're eating 1100 calories you're going to be real fucking hungry and that and you're not going to be able to perform well so it's but but then if you go to a smaller deficit, it doesn't take a whole lot to wipe out your deficit. So if you reality on most people, yeah, if you have a really good, you're really good Monday through Friday and on the weekend, you kind of splurge a little bit, you could wipe your deficit out for the entire week and just a few meals over the weekend. If you're, if you're not cooking for yourself and you're ordering Uber Eats or you're ordering, you're not, you're eating a bunch of stuff out of boxes. If you look at labeling laws, they can be off by law, plus or minus 20% calories. So if you're on a 20% deficit and you're eating a lot of stuff out of boxes and not cooking it yourself, you could be, you could think you're in a 20% deficit. You're actually not in any deficit because the labels could be off. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the time we don't even realize when we're snacking or nibbling or this, that, and the other, and you'll think that you're in a deficit because you can think of things that you just had extra. And this also goes back to the that most people aren't in a place to diet because you've been fatigued mentally from trying to do it so long. Like when it comes to dieting you need to be in a place where you can give it your 100 and you need to be able to endure it for the period of time that you doing it i have a client right now she in her first battle phase since the three years she's been with me and she went through a week of hardly any sleep down god knows where with her daughter going through hospital shit with her she cleared up with training she still stuck to her calories she was able to grind through it because she doesn't have the diet fatigue anymore that she came to me with. That is what makes results. When you're in a place where you can give it your very freaking best and you can't do that when you're staying fatigued. Can I just say that if you're going to be not dieting, you're still fatigued and chronically in the place where you're never going to get into a place to diet. If you're still thinking when's the next battle space, I can't wait to lean out. Coach, when are you going to cut my calories? You're still fatigued. But I want to go back to that part. And I would say too, like you don't, when we say, when we say stop dieting, that doesn't mean you have to be in a surplus. That just means, I mean, you have another default mode here, which is maintenance or maintenance minus five or 10% or plus five or 10. You can stay somewhere on maintenance. And if you, if we have people who are too scared to jump those calories up, just add, look, if you added a hundred calories, that's 25 grams of carbs. You could add a banana a day, add a banana a day. for a week, if you haven't gained significant amounts of weight because you're not going to, then add another 100 calories, add another 25 grams of protein. Like that's like add one more cooked chicken breast, 100 grams of cooked chicken breast is 30, 31 grams of protein. Add a banana the first week, the second week, add one more 100 gram cooked chicken breast. You've now effectively added 200 calories and you go, I'm feeling better, but I'm not actually gaining weight. Great. Okay. Now the third week, what can we, what can we add? If your protein's still a little bit too low, let's add another, maybe a hundred grams of lean fillet steak or some fish or prawns or another chicken breast. If you're low on your carbs, add another piece of fruit or add a little bit of pasta or something like that. But you can, you can make these, these hundred calorie adjustments every week. And then you can look at the scale and go, wow, I'm not actually gaining weight and I'm, I'm sleeping better and I'm feeling better and I'm training, I'm able to train better with no fatigue. You just keep adding 100 calories until you get to a point where a couple of weeks your weight is consistently chipping up 50 grams, 75 grams. Great. Now we actually know where the top end is and we know where you started. Now it's easy to just remove 25 grams of carbs a week until you're hitting the rate of fat loss that is appropriate. But again, it takes time to ramp up, takes time to ramp down. That's if you're scared. If you're not scared, just crank the food back up. And if you start gaining too much weight, start pulling a hundred calories out every week until you lose weight again. I really want to get to this gut health pop, but you just remind me of something. Someone came to me and she was like, you're, you were right, Ruby. I should have just done it the way that you said. She went to someone who just brought up her calories just a little bit and just getting out of that diet place that she was, she started binging like crazy because her hunger. Yes. Even Even though she was eating more food, her hunger was worse out of the diet than it was in a diet. I want you to talk about why that happens before I talk about that whole thing. I mean, if that's the case, that's your brain. Okay, remember we talked about like going through evolutionary. If we look at it from an evolutionary perspective, it's normal for us to go through feast and famine periods, right? So after a famine period, which is what a client like that would be on, the minute they start eating more, their brain automatically thinks it's time to feast. Now I need to get all these calories back that I wasn't able to get because it was a long, rough winter where I couldn't find food. Of course you're going to binge. And that's not normally a problem. If you're going to eat like what we're going to designate as clean foods, like I hate that whole thing. There's no such thing as clean or dirty foods. Like, come on. We all know what that means, right? Like a Twinkie versus a fucking chicken breast. We know that you can say it's dirty versus clean, or you can say not as beneficial versus beneficial. You can call it whatever you want. But we know that there's a different value from a tub of ice cream versus a chicken, rice, and broccoli or whatever you're going to eat, right? But the problem that we have nowadays is we have food scientists that put additives and things in foods that make them more yummy. And they learned that if we combine sugar, salt, and fat in one product, it's going to make you want more. It's going to taste delicious. It's going to hit receptors in your brain that it's going to make you want to keep eating. So if somebody gets to that point and you're feeling really hungry and you're bingey, you just need to eat more like unprocessed foods because no one is ever going to overeat on chicken rice and broccoli. No one's ever going to overeat.

read on steak and eggs and asparagus. Like it ain't gonna happen. And you can try it. You feel bingey? Go cook yourself, go cook yourself a 250 gram ribeye, throw a couple of eggs on the plate and have some asparagus. And you eat that and you're like, I don't really need to eat anymore. Now, if you go and you eat a bowl of cereal, you're gonna eat the whole fucking box. And then you're gonna look for something else to eat. And that's the thing, like I can't stop binging. Eat another fucking meal. Eat another whole unprocessed food meal with a balanced protein, carbs, fats, and veggies, and tell me you're still bingey. No, that pretty much hit the spot. I'm like, there you go. Yeah, we've got a problem where you've triggered this binging thing, but what's gonna make it worse is if you give into those impulse desires and eat the shit food because you're gonna not be able to stop yourself. But if you ate the good food first and then had a little bit of that treat afterwards, you probably would be, you definitely will be able to control yourself with the treats. This is why I hate the antidote. diet culture. That's a whole other podcast, Luke. We need another podcast on just the anti-diet. But Luke actually watched me eat a whole box. I can attest. Luke watched me eat a whole box of cereal. It's really freaking easy to do. And I'm going to tell you, I still want more cereal after that because that's what that food does. You can be so full and still want more of it because it's so bloody tasty. And sadly, with the eating thing, leptin, the fullness hormone, takes at least two weeks to come back up as well so your next time your biology is fighting you too like you have you have a number of you have a number of things that are going to increase satiety between leptin cholecystokinin with different incretins you know glucagon all that but it takes time and that is that is that is hoping that the receptors are even working the way they're supposed to work right so it's like leptin in somebody who's overweight people who are overweight already have a higher level of leptin which is one of the reasons why they never feel satisfied because the leptin receptor doesn't work the way it's supposed to so even though they have the leptin it's not giving them the signal to stop eating that kind of factors into the whole insulin resistance thing as well it's like as soon as we get a lot of it that is way it becomes resistant but talking about the gut health thing there is a reason why cortisol is haywire like you said and there's a reason why your gut is a mess and it's not because you're aging and it's not because you need a menopause protocol or PCOS means you need this different diet programming strategy. So I want to talk about the truth of cortisol in the right way. And I guess in this, it is worthy to point out that a fear of food, especially when you're about to eat it, can cause the same fuck-up-itis because it's a source of stress and your gut is going to respond to that so chronic stress it's the real reason it holds people back is not because of cortisol being haywire because all of those reasons but it does if you are not then because i know that you said this in cerebro but it's the cortisol becomes an issue when you can't recover from it anything becomes an issue when you can't recover from it but well let's not let's take cortisol out of the equation let's just say chronic stress because here's the thing cortisol Cortisol is just doing what the brain's telling it to do. Is cortisol a stress hormone? Yes. But we need to stop saying it's a stress hormone. And let me clarify. That is not the only thing it does. It helps liberate full substrate. It helps liberate carbs. It helps liberate glycogen. It helps move stuff around the body. There's a lot of sites. It helps control internal systems like your immune system. It helps regulate inflammation. It does a lot of shit. It's like it's like a personal trainer. If somebody said, Ruby, you're a personal trainer. Therefore, all you do is count reps. Does that is that encompass all the stuff you do? And that's it's slightly insulting, isn't it? So it's like if you look at a personal trainer where we're like, OK, we have to teach. We're educators. We're teaching. We're we're we're architecting. We're architects because we're creating these beautiful programs based on assessments. so we're surveyors as well we're also we're also the project managers making sure all the pieces fit like there was a lot of shit we're doing so if you just said hey you all you're you count reps for a living that is highly insulting and not conclusive of everything that we do it's the same thing with cortisol and the same thing with insulin insulin yes part of what insulin does is store things whereas cortisol is helps to relinquish things but though but the thing is cortisol, insulin, if we look at that, it doesn't just store things. It also prevents things from being relinquished There a lot of things that these hormones are doing And we we we do there a lot of I don know if they just nefarious or if they stupid The people who go cortisol cortisol and they want to again they want to sell you some shit So I have to think they're kind of stupidly nefarious because they're doing soundbites and clickbait shit to get you to give them money. And they're not telling the whole story. And I reckon most of them don't know the whole fucking story because they've read a book on cortisol. Now they're a fucking expert. It's just like somebody winning their pro card. So, yeah, I won the Miss Alice Springs International. I was the best looking physique out of three girls and I have my pro cards and I'm going to train people for bodybuilding shows. Like, fuck off. Or people will be like, I read a book on cortisol that was written in like 1984. So now I'm a cortisol expert. No, you're not. There's so much more to do with these hormones than people think. And they all work together in a matrix alongside the nervous system and the brain. So cortisol is not fucking you up. It's the shit that is giving your brain a reason to push out the excess cortisol. You have to stop it at the root area, which is going to be in the brain. Just like the mountain isn't the training or the nutrition. The mountain is you. So we need to trace this shit back. This is like my theme now. I'm so glad I'm reading that book. But talking on the pro thing, I had a girl come to me saying that her pro coach put her on 1,600 calories to build muscle. And she just ended up looking like shit. Wait, wait, wait. yeah you say 600 calories to build muscle yeah did she start out weighing 26 kilos it's just like i don't understand but speaking of cortisol hey luke how was the 20 shots you had before you had something to eat did that cortisol make you fat i see this obese gentleman in front of me like no i i hate that it's like just cortisol cortisol does not make you fat i wish this would go away it does not make you fat it basically pulls fat out of fat cells like how but i want to make a post on that because it's just like you do realize that cortisol stimulates this thing called hsl which means that lipase aka breaking down fat i still remember this luke aka the fat comes out of the cells therefore you are losing fat from fat cells due to the fact that cortisol is in the system. Yes, yes, yeah. We look at hormone system of life's pace, and so we're looking at, we'll just look at what classification is cortisol and catecholamines, right? So you have cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. I don't see anybody bashing adrenaline and noradrenaline. Why? Because you don't really have an available blood test to test that, and they have a really short action in the body. So you blame cortisol for just kind of being in the area, but he was kind of minding his own business doing nothing and we just forget that there's all these other people it'd be like if you rob the bank if you rob the bank with a group of six people you're the only one who got caught and it got all blamed on you well there's five other people that were involved and you're not a snitch so you didn't rat them out it's like now you're like this dude is the dude who's robbing all these banks no these six dudes are the dudes that are robbing the bank you just got caught because you tripped i really wanted to talk about how cortisol impacts metabolism gut health vitamin and mineral depletion and all that shit but now i want to go into this thing first because oh my god adrenaline hey luke stop doing cardio because your adrenaline's making you fat no it's women need to stop doing cardio because now your cortisol is through the roof and now it's storing body fat in your stuff it's it's like no i know and that's the thing it goes it goes ties it ties into what we talked about with nutrition right so like like i said you can starve your weight off. You can starve and lose a ton of fat, but you're going to lose a lot of muscle too. So it's like, let's say you did cardio by itself with no actual weight training. Yeah, that's kind of like basically pulling your deficit into a really low deficit. You're going to lose weight. Yeah, that's going to be fat, but you're going to pull a lot of muscle too. So your body composition is not going to be better and it could possibly be worse. But that's the beautiful thing about weights. And, you know, the reason you want to weight train, why that has to be a cornerstone in a fat loss program is because you have to try to prevent your body from wanting to break that muscle tissue down, which means also that you have to regulate what you're doing. Just like most people wouldn't be able to handle two sessions of weight training five days a week. Like there are specific situations where you would do that. But if somebody said, I want to put on a bunch of muscle. So I'm going to train twice a day, 10 sessions a week. You're like, bro, like you don't actually need to do that. And you're actually just going to make it everything worse because you can't recover. So it's like a little bit of cardio is good, especially if it's programmed for the right reason. But that doesn't mean that like, if you're doing four, like say four 30 minute sessions of cardio a week that doesn mean that 12 30 minute sessions is going to be heaps better You got to do the right amount of things right It goes back to that whole women just think that more is going to push you past the plateau or stop you being stuck It's like, no, you just need strategy. But I think it's not just women because men think the same thing too. They think that more – when I hit a plateau, I must not be doing enough of something. And I'm like, I can tell you, you're probably not sleeping enough. you're probably you're probably not training hard enough you're probably not recovering enough what you don't need to do is add a bunch of shit to it and do like i need to do four more hours of training doing more training is not the problem doing better quality of training with what you're already doing is is usually if you're training one day a week and you go well i've now plateaued all right yeah yeah more training is probably going to help you but if you're already training like three to five times a week with weights and maybe you're doing a little little little handful of cardio for your blood pressure and for general health adding five more sessions of weights is not what's going to push you over the hump you need to take those five sessions you're already doing and you need to go harder you need to make every rep count and you need to make sure that you're recovering because like you like we said before like you go in the gym and you're you're creating at some level some inflammation through myokines you're creating some you are creating some muscle breakdown and that's going to be the catalyst to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. But where do you get the majority of that? While you're resting, while you're sleeping. So if you're going to train hard, you need to rest hard. And if you're going to train, if you're not training hard, you're wasting your, you're not, I'm not going to say you're wasting your time because any training is good training, right? So as long as you're going to the gym and you're doing something, you're moving in the right direction. But if you want results, you're going to have to push yourself to a level of discomfort. You're going to have to go a little bit harder. Going through the motions isn't enough. This is the perfect way. I'm not even going to talk about the whole gut thing because this is where I want to end this whole thing because this section is going to resonate with everyone, like you just said with the pushing hard. Now, you see me. You see other lean people doing, quote, unquote, hybrid training. Cardio does not make those people lean. Cardio is not making me lean. Cardio isn't going to give you lean legs. It doesn't make you lean. Doing HIIT up hills isn't going to make you leaner. Although it could probably make a little bit of a bump up if you are really untrained because it can kind of use up. It's just like everything. It's a stimulus. It's a catalyst. Until it's not. That is where training comes in. When it's not a catalyst anymore, we have to push it a little harder. But I know where you're going with this, though, because the thing is it's not like the training is one piece. nutrition's another piece rest and recovery is another piece right so it's like yeah like will HIIT training make you leaner yes if you control your calories and you you eat for the performance and you don't eat more than what you need to perform and you don't eat too little what you need for them like it's again it's the Goldilocks thing right it's like you have the muscle there to start with which is kind of like the population that I coach people want this lean physique and they think that cardio is the answer there or hybrids the answer there to me for my population we will talk about the obese people because i wanted to talk about that too but the starting place should be getting as strong as fuck first building the muscle walking putting the other time into recovery and just maximizing how much muscle you can build because you don't have seven days a week when you're a busy mom like building muscle and walking need to be the main things and weights need to be your focus and i will i will say i disagree with you i know i'm gonna bring in the cardio just now because you're trying to trick me yeah exactly because i'm not i'm not muscle nods i'm not muscle mods but you need to build the body to reveal the body now you mentioned this before as well a lot of people can't push themselves the way they need to in the gym because they don't have the training capacity there in terms of the endurance so i knew you were going to bring that in and this factors in for those people as well as when someone's coming to us with excess adiposity, I know that you are a huge fan of front loading, which you can explain what that means. Aerobic work. Why is that? How are you going to progress that person who, well, I would say Marlon already touched on that, but that person that wants to get the physique, they have excess body fat to lose. They want to lose that and they want to build muscle and they want to look good. Pretty much the majority of people. Well, okay. So there's a man, there's a lot of stuff I could say on this. The one thing is I will front load the cardio for almost every client. And the reason I do is based on the metrics. It has nothing to do with fat loss for most people now for really overweight people, yeah, I'll front load it because of that, because of the caloric output and to get their mitochondria beefed up quickly so they can oxidize quickly Same way explain that part because I think this is like if people could understand that when you have really good aerobic health and you are generally aerobically fit you burn fat better, you burn carbs better, you find it easy to lose weight, you find it easy to stay lean because you have the cardio there. And it's, this is why I hate social media, but like saying, bashing on cardio as well in different ways. It's like, no, seriously, prioritize your cardio because it will make fat loss so much easier for you please save my pain and now the problem nowadays though is we were the pendulum swinging and in our industry the pendulum swings one side or the other it never meets in the middle so it's like it used to be no cardio you don't need cardio now it's like oh cardio is healthy so we need all the cardio wait wait wait no no don't go over there like you were over here the point isn't to go over here it's to stop right here. It's again, like I need a little bit of cardio, not all the cardio. So it's like, especially if you aren't in building strength and strength and size, which again, should be, should be a cornerstone of your programming. But if we look at, we need to, we need to define what cardio is, a cardiovascular respiratory training. It should primarily be used for adaptations to the cardiovascular respiratory system, meaning the ability to get oxygen in the body, pump through the body, and then carbon dioxide pumped back to the heart to then be released into the atmosphere. So if you're going to put in cardio in those initial stages, use it because you're trying to get in better aerobic cardiovascular shape. Use it because it is the best, easiest tool to get your mitochondria oxidizing the fuel that you're trying to get off your body. Because when you release fat, it has to go somewhere. So it goes into your bloodstream and it has a choice. It goes around the body and it tries to find a cell to go into so that it can be either oxidized using oxygen to create energy, or we can use it to create heat. Now, if it can't go into the muscle and it can't go into the mitochondria because you don't have good mitochondrial volume or your mitochondria is not working in like peak tip top shape. It's going to sit around in the bloodstream and it's either going to sit there or it's going to go back in the fat stores. So you have on one side, you have the release of fat and you have the transport of fat. On the other side, you have the actual getting rid of the fat by turning it into either carbon dioxide and using it to create energy or using it to create heat. And so now if we relate that to lean people versus overweight people. You have this continuum and the physiology, even though we're all mammals, we're all humans, the physiology between those two people is not the same. So people who are really overweight have a really easy time pushing fat into the bloodstream. They have a problem getting rid of it after that fact. They can transport it. They can get in the bloodstream. This is why you get a lot of overweight people and you look at their labs, high triglycerides, really fucked up blood fats, dyslipidemia, all this. But then you go to a lean person, their problem isn't oxidizing. They can get rid of energy really easily. Their problem is getting the fat to where they get rid of it in the first place, because the leaner you get, the less the body wants to relinquish that fat. So now we can also talk about like the HIIT and like steady state cardio. How's that tie in here too, because if you're really overweight, when you were talking about how like intense stuff and stress creates a response to hormone sensitive lipase. Now what that does, hormone sensitive lipase, it is sensitive to catecholamines, which means under stress, your body thinks that it needs energy. It knows it needs energy. So you're going to try to get energy in the bloodstream. Hormone sensitive lipase is activated. And so what that's going to do is take that triglyceride that's in your adipocyte, your fat cell, and it's going to break it down into a glycerol and a diacylglycerol and a fatty acid. Then it's going to break it down from diacylglycerol and a monoisoglycerol and a fatty acid. That glycerol and that fatty acid is going to go into the bloodstream. And what we're hoping is that fatty acid can find its way into some cell where it can be turned into heat or energy. Now, really overweight people don't have a problem with that. So for really overweight people, walking is the gateway drug into getting better mitochondria. But we also have to realize that anything that's low intense, you're going to adapt to really quickly. So once you've adapted, let's say you give somebody 10,000 steps. You have a decision to make. You're either going to go longer or you're going to go harder. So it's like you go from 10,000 to 12,000. Okay, cool. So now we've created a bigger stimulus. When you adapt to that, what's your decision? 14,000, 15,000 steps, or you just go harder. At some point, you just simply can't do more steps. At that point, that's where like,

dedicated steady state cardio works really well because now i've taken a like you can't get any more lists any more low intense steady state you can't get lower than walking but you can go up from there so you can go to faster walking at some point you can't walk faster because then you're jogging so then in order to do that maybe you get on an elliptical and you crank it up a little bit So that's how you progress. You have to do more volume or you have to do it harder. And logistically, the thing that makes the most sense is to go a little bit harder. And what's nice is you're losing weight, you're getting in better shape, you can go harder, it's not a big deal. Right? But you have those two tools leveraged. Now when you get to the lean side, the problem again is relinquishing the fat. So while low and moderate and high intensity steady state cardio is still beneficial for people who are lean, if you're trying to get real lean like Ruby or myself and we're dick skin lean, like you want to have skin that feels like your eyeball. like if you do your if you squeeze your your eyelid like that and you want skin that's that thin then like stage competition the the easiest way to do that is yeah throw in a little bit of hit and it doesn't it doesn't make hit special except for the fact that hit helps to create a situation where it's easier to get fat out of the fat cell so it doesn't make hit better than less or miss or his, it makes it different and valuable in a different situation. Now, going back to that, like people who are overweight don't need to do HIIT. Like the whole purpose of HIIT is to help with that fat, like fat breakdown aspect. You need that when you're already at an average level of body fat or really lean, but don't do it until you need it. Like you don't need it. Right. You said this at the mentorship, just quickly, you said this at the mentorship where most people don't even do HIIT. It's just crap. They basically, they'll do these classes. I remember when I first met my wife. So when I first met Zoe, she was doing these boot camps, right? So she was a workaholic. She was going in the morning and doing boot camps and Tabata classes. And I was like, what the fuck is a Tabata class? And then she was working in an office all day. Then she would go back and train people. And she did this every fucking day. Like she's a fucking animal. I said, what is a Tabata class? She goes, oh, it's 45 minutes and we just do Tabata. I'm like, that's not Tabata. Like I can show you the literature. I can show you the research. Like Tabata is a highly specific protocol just because you're doing like 20 seconds on 10 seconds off. That doesn't make it Tabata. Like that just means you're doing intervals of 20 seconds on 20, 10 seconds off. Like that you're basically doing aerobics. You're doing aerobics and you're just picking a bunch of different body weight exercise to do it. If you're going to do hit, hit, hit is high intensity, which means you have to go as hard as possible. It'd be like doing a one rep max. you can never say a one rep max is a low intensity set it's the most other than until you go above 100 where you're doing like slow eccentrics with weight releasers there's nothing that's going to get more intense than that stuff you can go down from there but you can't go up give me five give me five sets of your one rep max and that wasn't your run right now well the thing is if you have enough rest it can be but most people don't rest enough fuck how much time do we have yeah you want to you go to a powerlifting gym if you ever trained like a powerlifting gym where they're training for like three fucking hours half of that is them trying to fit their fat asses in a bench shirt but the other half is like fucking 15 20 minutes of rest in between max lifts right but if you look at if you want to do hit and you want to do it correctly it's not fun it sucks it is it's horrendous you know you get on like i'll get on my bike i have a bike in the shed a road bike that's on a trainer and i'll do i'll do like Tabata's on that where it's cranking up the wattage to like 750 reps for the first or 750 watts for 20 seconds and it's a the longest 20 fucking seconds of your life and the shortest 10 seconds of your life and you'll hit eight of those boom traditional Tabata and you have 10 minutes rest you do one more and after one of those Tabata's you're like you're almost crying because you know you have one more to do in 10 to 15 minutes and I don't want to do it but I got to do it and like people don't understand if you actually did hit you wouldn't want to do hit anymore if you did it correctly he gave me 20 seconds on and three minutes off once and that was the most fucked thing ever i was like this is gonna be easy no it was not shortest three minutes of your life yeah i was gonna i was gonna say to bring up amanda because i know that this is a really good one so i don't know where to start this it really grinds my ears macro coaches calorie calculators people who are really overweight and then the online saying 1200 calories is for a toddler and you shouldn't go that low but then you're really overweight and then they put that into a Mac if you get someone who's really overweight and they put their stuff into a calorie calculator you know very well that that going to give a really high number because you overweight And then you have macro coaches doing the same thing And then they demonize it when the calories are really low And then that client in particular will probably get really scared that they have really low calories. But it's like, it doesn't work that way when you have a lot of body fat to lose. Tell me more about how you would approach fat loss for that. Yeah, I mean, look, at the end of the, number one, when you're calculating calories, it's a starting point. It's a starting point to see how somebody responds. And then we have to make those constant adjustments. But if you, if you have a significant amount of weight to lose, it doesn't make sense to feed for your, for your physique right now, because fat does have a calorie cost. Fat is, fat is more organically active and calorically active than people think. That doesn't mean you need to feed it. Like you need to feed your bones and your muscles and your soft tissue and your brain and all that. But I, what I tell people to do is feed for the body you want. So let's say you're a woman and you're 100 kilos. Mate, you're 5 foot 6. What's that? 164 centimeters or something. You're like 100 kilos. Like you're big. You got a big surface area. And if you wanted to diet, it doesn't make sense to write the diet for the 100 kilos. If you know that the best you've ever looked was at 65 kilos and that's where you want to be, start your diet for 65 kilos, not 100 kilos. And then make the adjustments from there. because it makes no sense to feed yourself for that extra, what, 35 kilos of body weight because you're trying to get rid of that. Like, that food you ate through the past few years, and we're trying to get rid of that. And so what we need to do is put yourself in a position where you have a deficit that your body is going to cover with the food that you have that you've eaten in the past and not eat future and present food right now. So is that you wanted me to tell everybody what Amanda was on? yeah yeah so I had a client and she was a hundred and two kilos at five foot two five foot two or so so yeah she had a big surface area and you know we I was like look fucking how fast you want this off she's as fast as possible she was on 900 calories for 13 months so yeah 900 calories for 13 months and she was still training for four days a week, like an absolute animal. And people will go, man, you can't put people on 900 calories. And like, well, she went from 102 to around 64 kilos in 13 months and was never hungry. And her performance still was still gangbusters. So you can't tell me it doesn't work because it absolutely worked. Now, the caveats is that we did have to use supplementation because we have less food coming in, that's less nutrients, nutrition. So she had to be consistent with taking her iron supplement. She had to be consistent with taking a multivitamin. She had to be consistent with taking her fish oil and, uh, and she had to feel good. So yeah. So we dropped one Oh two to 60, like 64, 13 months at 900 calories, still training four days a week, like an absolute animal. And I basically, she, I was like, at some point we obviously, we have to eat more. Like you understand this. We, we can't, you can't live on sub thousand calories. So as we get close to 60 something kilos, I want you to use hunger as a guide. You tell me when you're starting to feel some hunger, and then we're going to slowly methodically bring your calories back up. And that's exactly what we did. Yeah. And once people realize that it's not about some magical calorie number, it's the starting place. Exactly. But there was, there was this person who was eating in your deficit calories doesn't mean you're going to lose weight because the deficit calories into account the calories out. And there was someone who was eating in a deficit and she was meticulous with everything. She was like, I'm eating literally at 72 calories. I'm tracking everything. I know how to track blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I'm not losing weight. And she was really overweight. And I'm just like, okay, cool. So among all of these hormone coaches above, I'm going to give you your answer. How many steps do you do a day? her answer i sometimes get 2 000 but i sit on my butt most of the day i'm like well there's your answer it's not your deficit that's a great place to start is maybe we go to 5 000 steps and see what happens maybe we increase no but everyone they were like three this was like a really popular facebook group there were 300 and something likes on someone saying i'm a i'm a holistic coach and i do this gut testing and blah blah blah bro how many fucking steps do you do Like literally, I can tell you right now that people need to stop looking for the most convoluted, complex solution to their problems. Most of the time, it's going to be a one or a handful of very simple things to do. Right. And until you do those simple things, don't go to the complex. You may very well have a gut issue And I not going to say you don like let say you know and you know you seen our intake forms like we ask about We have two different gut digestive analysis questionnaires We do We do testing when it appropriate but most of the stuff that happening you can fix a lot of it with zero testing and then throw the testing in when there's a hurdle that's just not, that's not being fixed by the normal, easy things. You go to, there's like Zoe finishing up her clinical nutrition degree. She's actually, I think Tuesday or Wednesday is her last day next week. It's just, I'm gobsmacked at some of the things that these people say, like, did you guys even go to the same university she did? And I think the only reason that she knows as much as she does, because she's been in the industry for as long as she has. And that's what we do. But like one of her, one of her advisors thinks that, you know, you should not feed anybody more than like one or 1.2 grams per kilogram of protein. And if you eat more than that, your bones are going to snap in half. They still have girls at that university think that protein is going to be automatically just turned into fat um it's like it's it's insane and that's fun in the other direction now i don't know whether you've seen it but now it's like you can get away with this much protein have you seen it lately it's like i was wrong you don't need 1.1 grand have you seen that lately or no but you can get away with a stupidly high amount of protein if you can fucking afford it and digest it but people are on the other spectrum now or it's just like i was wrong you don't need one gram per pound you can actually have this tiny that that's not not if you're training and you want to build a physique like i mean it's it's insane like even i was looking at because i was i was trying to make a case for zoe because her her advisor's a dietitian so it's like oh it's kind of hard to you know you got to be really picky what you say to them because they think that just because they're a dietitian that they know more than you so i said okay i'm going to look up the recommendations from another dietitian so i went to louise burke who if you know who that is she's like the fucking og of australian sports dietitians like she's the one doing all the research and she even says in the paper i pulled that you can eat eating up to around 2.6 grams per kilogram for like athletic endeavors and building muscle seems to be a good spot more than that is probably as far as performance and muscle building is probably wasted but that doesn't mean it's wasted from other things because protein does a lot more than build muscle but it's like she's saying you can eat up to 2.6 fuck i'm gonna tell my clients eat at least 2.6 if they can but not everybody's i'm you know i tell people eat as much protein as you can fucking afford and digest and tolerate you know me i mean i eat like 3.3 grams per kilogram a day and i mean i'm i'm not doing too bad for almost 47 year old man but then uh me as well yeah we love our protein man look it the least likely thing to be nefarious is protein unless you got a pre-existing kidney issue or weird amino acid genetic polymorphism but The reason that most people have issue with protein is because the majority of people don't eat enough. I think the majority of the problem I have with this is so fucking expensive right now because Woolies and Cole wants to bend you over. And the butcher is always expensive too. I'm sorry, Leif. I'm still on chicken breast. That's all right. I'm eating chicken all day today. I'm eating chicken breast all day because of the protein sparing modified fast. And I'm eating 1,400 calories right now. And I weigh 98 kilos. So it's like, oh, you can't eat under 1,500. Well, fat is melting off my body right now, and I'm only doing it for 12 days. I know it's funny, though. Your cortisol is probably through the roof, yet you're still losing fat. And that's the funny thing because people who are in the most- Well, my cortisol is not because I'm super stress-free. Like, I don't- Even though I have stressful shit going on, I think one of the best things that people can do, and this is hard. It takes practice. Stop being reactive to things. So, like, just don't be reactive. Just don't worry about it. The minute when I figured that out many, many years ago and I went, OK, so there's always going to be situation is stressful, but every stressful situation will rectify itself over time. So no matter what happens, the worst thing you can do is be reactive to something that doesn't that's not helpful. Like you can cry about something. You can get angry. You can yell at the moon. That's not fixing the problem. What's going to fix the problem is staying calm and working on fixing the problem. And that's hard because people can get overwhelmed with stress. But I, man, I get my, my HRV is fucking sky high. My heart rate is like 47. My blood pressure is perfect. I sleep like a baby. And the reason is because I just disassociated that, that part of me that gets really stressed out and I just don't allow myself to get stressed out. Yeah. And this kind of factored into the whole, the impact stress has on gut things. Cause we were talking about that just before as well. I actually, I was trying to figure out why my gut was such a mess the other, a couple of weeks ago, for some reason, I have a sensitivity to mango. I don know why I finally let I hardly ever used to eat mango but the mangoes here in Queensland is so much better Oh my God So good My my gut is in agony when I eat mangoes and I don know whether it the fruit there content in it and I have some sensitivity to it. I don't know. Keep in mind, there's thousands of chemicals, thousands of different chemicals in the food that we eat. So it's like a lot of people will, I'll give you another good story about this. A lot of people will, they will try to isolate something to something they know right so you have somebody eats fruit and they go it must be the sugar or it must be something else right but what about the other 3 000 fucking compounds that are in that right how about how to eat the meal because a lot of people eat stress too but the thing is like you could have a you could have some type of genetic issue with some polyphenol that's only found in mango right you never know right or you may it may just you know it may be a a weird thing that something else could be causing the issues, but the mango is a catalyst that now makes you feel it. So every time you eat the mango, you feel it. It might not be the mango at all, but the safest thing to do is just don't eat mango for a while and then try the mango again and see if it bothers you. So yesterday, Zoe was at school and there's a thing. These people are all about to graduate, which is really fucking scary because people think that credentials mean you know shit. It doesn't. I know plenty of PhDs who don't know fucking anything, but they think they do because they've got a PhD. So these are all people coming out for clinical nutrition, naturopathy. And one of the girls who is massively anti-carb, you know me, like I don't, I, I, I'm a low carb person for me, but that doesn't mean I'm a low carb person for other people. Low carb for me is like 250 grams of carbs, right? And when I died, it might be now where I'm eating like 50 grams of carbs, but I, I match carbs to what I'm doing and that's how I look at it. So if I was doing a lot of triathlon duathlon training i'd be eating 600 grams of carbs right but this one she thinks carbs are the devil once they're going to kill you and so she she was telling everybody that she can eat a sugar-free lolly and it will take her fasting blood sugar from five to ten the blood sugars oh my god the blood sugar shit listen listen listen to what i said it's a sugar free that it doesn't have any reactive sugar in it it's it's sugar it's got some sugar alcohols in it very little like 500 micrograms 500 milligrams and then it's got some like fibrous stuff that doesn't fuck with blood sugar anyway so zoe sends me a message and goes here's the thing she says that her blood she tested her blood sugar was five she ate one of these lollies that doesn't have any sugar in it and her it took her blood sugar to 10 where the fuck is that blood sugar coming from and I'm like it's not came from anywhere she she fucked up somewhere it's even it's an isolated thing that happened and the last thing she ate was that lolly so she's attributing it to the lolly or she could have fucked up the the she could have fucked up the blood so then they all went and got those lollies and went and bought a glucometer and sure as shit she was convinced she was making all of these weird hypotheses of what was happening and one of them was just completely outrageous, but they did it again. She didn't react from it. So she probably, what probably happened was she didn't wash her hands off and had some sugar residue on her finger and that got in the blood. And that's what made it look like her blood went up because people don't always know you have to wash your hands before you stick. And you never take the first blood. You take the third or fourth drop of blood, squeeze them out, wipe it off on a clean rag, squeeze it out, and then take like the third or fourth. And that should be a better estimate of blood sugar. But she was saying, I think it's the cephalic response. I think it was my taste bud receptors tasted the sugar. And then I had a sugar somewhere, sugar was being pushed out by the liver or something. And I went, that doesn't make any sense because the cephalic response would basically push out insulin, which means you would have gone hypoglycemic. You wouldn't have gone hyperglycemic. So it makes sense. But this is where people can get really weird trying to figure out what's wrong and they can create all these weird scenarios in their head and none of them make any logical fucking sense it's usually that that's exactly why i usually hate the whole fixation on the stupid blood sugar bullshit it's like people are they're focusing on the wrong doesn't matter for the majority of people unless you're diabetic that shit doesn't matter well it does matter but it matters in specific situations and the only way the only way you're going to tell is if you actually measure your blood sugar. So if you are to, if you went, I think something's happening, it's the sugar I'm eating. Okay, cool. Let's spend three hours fast to take your blood sugar. Now let's eat, say 70 grams of sugar and let's see what happens. And all of a sudden the sugar goes sky high. I'm like, you're right. Right now at the current time, sugar's an issue for you. So maybe we go with a lower carb diet and then do that for three months and then we'll retest it. And then all of a sudden they're, they're, they're got a great blood sugar response, but or they may go, I think it's sugar. And then we take their blood sugar and their blood sugar

barely moves. I'm like, not the blood sugar, bro. Like we've just proven to you that it's not the blood sugar. It's something else. And what happened in that space between that is what coaches should like proper coaches, not like the PTs at the gym, but proper coaches should be helping you through to get your health in a good place. And this is where muscle comes in as well, because muscle allows you to be able to use carbs better because like Luke said, just previously, things get shuffled into your blood those things need to go somewhere that can get dispersed off as heat or something else or stored which is in the muscle and that is going to be so much better for your health than when it's circulating in your blood and when it's circulating in your blood it's going to have side effects that is going to stop you from getting the body composition results that you want it's going to stop you from burning fat effectively because now you have all of these cock blocks which i actually prefer that term it's cock blocking you for results the thing like the more muscle you have the more glycogen storage you have which means you have a little bit more wiggle room to eat more carbohydrates and have somewhere to put them other than esterifying them put them in fat cells i love that to tie this all off because i got asked from one of my older clients to ask you this as well and especially the fact that you're moving through your ages and you look as young as hell and you're keeping your body as young as hell. What other things that we need to know as we age, especially as women and preventing injury, I would say probably comes to everything we've said prior and do not skip steps. Like don't skip steps. And I mean, I would say, and this, this is valid at any age, but it becomes more important as you age, because if you get injured, the older you are, injuries take longer to heal. So if you get really badly injured when you're young, you can bounce back pretty easily. If you get really badly injured when you're older, it's going to take a long time and that could affect your quality of life for the rest of your life. So if you're going to get injured at older, you want to do it from like low level injuries and not because you did something stupid. So there's a whole checklist. First thing is, man, people need to fucking sleep. Stop. Get off your phones. Get off electronics tonight and fucking go to sleep. Learn how to read a fucking book. Get like a real paper book and read. have a nighttime a bedtime routine because that is what's going to make the biggest impact on everything else in your life the way you think how much energy you have your ability to train your ability to cope with life cope with stress you have to sleep and not just be unconscious in bed you have to have good deep restful sleep next thing is like you said with the technique don't fuck up your technique in the gym look think learn about range of motion strategies load strategies and don load a movement that you not ready to load yet And like delay it delayed gratification If you if you hitting a weight that you struggling with but you can keep the ship together, more weight is not going to be productive. It's going to make it worse because it's going to, you're going to start doing a different exercise and you're, you're going to hurt yourself at some point. Make sure you tick off your boxes for cardio. Make sure you're doing a good few sessions at minimum two to three sessions of lifting a week and try to get a couple hours of cardio in. You could do that in mixed steps. You could do that in dedicated cardio. Just keep in mind that the adaptations are slightly different. If you can do steps and cardio. So if you do like what's the minimal effective steps, you could say like 8,000 steps. If you're clicking that off and then clicking a 20 minutes of cardio, you're doing pretty fucking good. Especially if you're doing that every day, eat your fucking veggies and eat your protein. Like there's a lot of stuff, but as you age to sleep becomes really important as you age and not really it's easy for me to say eliminate stress but you know sometimes there's things you can't learn strategies on how to cope with stress and be less reactive because stresses with that stress and that catecholamine releases what's gonna age you probably more than anything and especially its effect that it has on insulin resistance and insulin management insulin and catecholamines and stress when they're out of balance and they're chronically raised is going to age you really fucking fast, really fast. And it's going to cause, like you said earlier, a lot of nutrient deficiencies, which most people aren't eating enough variety of foods and not taking a good multivitamin. They're not getting enough of those cofactors and our food quality is shit. So even the food quality in Australia is better than America, but not by much. And America's food quality is real shit, like bad. Most of the good food we have here, we ship other places like New Zealand and China, and they save the, like the bullshit for Australians. So if you want, like, honestly, if you have a good farmer's market, try to get your veggies and as much as you can from the farmer's market. I was blown away when I moved here. We moved to our current house, still in the house you've been to out near the beach. We have a really good farmer's market on Sundays and Zoe used to go and she convinced me to go one day and we, I was just really nice. So I bought a bunch of veggies. Those veggies lasted me like a month and then went and started to go off if i buy veggies from kohl's it goes off in like five days so like go to your near go to your farmer go to your farmer's markets buy the produce from them because it's gonna last longer and it's usually cheaper i love that i love that advice and your sleep is a huge thing i'm just gonna add one more thing to gym injuries because most do happen outside of the gym but never like know where your head is at when you go into the session because If you let yourself get distracted under the load of anything you are more likely to pop something pop something on a machine row because i let myself get distracted my brace wasn't there and because my brace wasn't there my ribs couldn't handle the load that i was lifting and then all of a sudden i popped something make sure you are there every single rep happened to me a few months ago on a warm-up set of dead lifts. And it's funny because you know, you, you saw when I like had a horrific back injury that I rehabbed, my back is amazing. I could sit here all day. No problems back. I can do anything I want. No problems. I was, I was in the, I was in my shed and I was doing dead lifts and I was warming up with 70 kilos, which is nothing. It's just, that's a, that's piddly little weight for me, but I let myself get distracted and I started to come up and there was a pop in my back and went, well, that's going to be three days of pain. And it was three days of pain. But if I had stayed in the moment that never would have happened. I love that you said that in your warm-up set and I think that's where a lot of injuries happen as well because people don't take their warm-up set seriously and then you get injured. So take every single set seriously because you are lifting heavy shit against what your body wants to be doing. Yeah I started going to a new gym. I found a really nice gym close to like two minute drive from the house in a big shed old school lots of hammer strength stuff and I'm like okay I'm doing this bullshit bodybuilder stuff for a few months I'll go there so I can use the machines and and I when I get on there even if I'm warming I might have 10 kilos on the side which is like feels like there's nothing on the machine I still get on there and get set and pretend I pretend like there's 80 kilos on there and I I don't fucking jerk the way I squeeze the weight up I pull it down I squeeze it up I pull it down if you were to if you were to not know what I was doing and watching me you would think I was the weakest fucking guy in the gym because it looks like i'm struggling with 10 kilos i don't really feel that weight i'm just pretending like it weighs a lot because i'm trying to get my brain and my body to to get primed up before the weight gets truly where i can feel the tension in in his go time i wish people learned how to do that because a lot of people don't know how to connect to their muscles and that is a huge part of lifting as well that's why it's like everything fits together But I am so excited for this to come out. There's something I want to say after this too. But for anyone listening to this, I'm going to have to put one of this, like one of these endings at the end of each section in here. But if you are wanting to know more about why protein is so freaking important, but why the carnivore diet is such a freaking toss, that's going to ruin up your health. Go listen to episode 251 I pretty sure it that one If you want to know about multivitamins and all the vitamins you need to make your metabolism and hormonal status and all that go listen to episode 253 because they're the last two that we did with Luke on that. And if you want to know more about the physique stuff on the nutrition side of things, go listen to episode 250, link them all down below as well. But otherwise, Luke honestly is a wealth of encyclopedic, that is now a word, just like your first one at the start of the class, knowledge. I would say go and listen to him. See if there's anything you can gain from the proofs that he puts up, even though there's a lot on there that are more targeted at creatures. But you might start to see that a lot of it is just the same shit on repeat for the fact that the basics are so – What works. Like, yeah, that's the thing. And because it's so basic, we get bored, and then we want to add more complexity to it because as soon as we find – always say as soon as we find the solution and it seems too easy it's almost like no we have to add something more complex to it like stop like and like if you really want to learn go buy my courses i need some money go buy my courses please i send you a discount code you know give me the option one please it's always got it i don't know what it is uh because i i think i better i think there's just a general 25 off right now code but i don't know what it is but i got two two things to say that are pretty funny you say you when you say complexity you know what i said for a long time instead of complexity until about three weeks ago complexity i don't know why i thought that was a word and i kept saying it i mean that doesn't sound right i had to look it up and i'm like it's complexity okay and the second thing is i hope nobody saw what just happened i've been under the weather and i coughed in this big fucking snot i didn't even say it now my hands are just covered with snot and boogers sorry sorry guys if you saw that bubble come out sorry it's uncontrollable clients i i don't i don't know whether i got it off luke or luke got it off me but he's older so i'll say i got it off him but we have our own dictionaries and we just we just we just yeah just make up words fuck it it's what we do we blame the adhd that's it complexity sounds better sounds cooler it does so i hope this complexity of a podcast gave you some things to churn in your minds and if any of it at all gets you too complex ask us message us and we will get back to you luke usually scrolls the phone for about three hours on his morning toilet visit so you're just on my just on my meme account though just posting memes that as well but i love you all and you will hear me on the next podcast thank you for listening