Building A Body That Lasts

# Building A Body That Lasts

**Channel:** Shane Storey | Storey StrengthCast
**Published:** 2025-06-06
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-CaOMle0Q

Thank you very much for coming on to the podcast. I'm excited to talk about, you know, training for health, training for longevity today, because it is, I guess like anytime people hear health or longevity, it is very ambiguous to a lot of people, because I think still there is a lot of probably too much information that people get from just bodybuilders and, you know, two degree strength athletes, you know because they typically tend to be the loudest as well as some of the most extreme voices online and you know people you know they see maybe a kind of visually striking physique and they're like okay that person must be like the epitome of health whether that's a an influencer or bodybuilder um but then when they look into like training methods you know just doing a push-pull leg split is probably not necessarily the best thing for every single person on the planet is one of every every aspect of their health like when he would i say like training for health training for longevity like what what do you think of where does your mind go to when i say that yeah well you're right it can be it can be a pretty ambiguous thing the first thing is you have to look at the context of the conversation because health and longevity may be different from a bodybuilder versus a powerlifter from your next door neighbor that you're training so So it really comes to, you know, you have those concepts like general physical preparedness and specific physical preparedness and everything that you're doing. You have an element of that. Right. So if we take something like bodybuilding and that's you know, those are the loudest voices. Everybody is massively obsessed about hypertrophy. It's all they talk about. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that a lot of coaches don't understand that if you're training gen pot people, they might not give a shit about that. Like, they don't care. I can count on one hand how many people have ever come to me that weren't powerlifters, that weren't bodybuilders, who said, hey, I want to do a triple bodyweight deadlift, and I want to put on 25 kilograms of raw mass, and I want to starve myself down until I'm 3% body fat. Like, it doesn't happen in the general population unless you're training, like, 20-year-olds. If you're training dudes in their 20s, and now that's traditional, but like nowadays conventional is like women want that too. But it's usually the younger crowds that are looking for that or other coaches. But if you ask people that are in their mid to late 30s, 40s, 50s, they don't care about any of that, right? They want to be strong enough to do stuff outside of the gym. They want to look good, but being less fat doesn't mean being dick skin shredded. So those are two concepts. And that's the problem we have with the industry is people tend to gravitate towards the things that they like. So it's like, yeah, I want to be dick, skin, lean. Yeah, I want big, massive pecs. And that's all they study. And so then they're training people who don't care about that stuff, but they're taking those techniques and that mentality and then serving on a platter for people who aren't – they're not looking for that, right? It's almost like – and it's not like a nefarious thing. other people just don't know any better right so if you went and bought a car and there was a car you had in mind and it was a specific color car that you wanted and this is your dream car and you showed up and they had a model that was similar but not the car you wanted and it was in a completely different color and they sold you that you wouldn't be really happy with that so it's like what we need to get better at doing is listening to people and saying hey uh my gen pop clients want longevity they want to be out of pain they want to be able to they They want anti-aging. They want to age gracefully. They want to improve stuff. They're using the gym to improve life outside of the gym. So we have to reframe our mentality around what they actually are asking us to do for them and what they need. Because if you're a bodybuilder, you think everybody needs to bodybuild. And I would say, you know, if you take the extreme muscle mass and extreme leanness out of bodybuilding, that's a really good model for gen pop. but I wouldn't say like conventional bodybuilding is not the perfect model for gym pop 70s and 80s bodybuilding where they actually still use movements not just muscle centric stuff and not trying to squeeze every motor unit in six sarcomeres in your biceps out in every workout like bodybuilders this it's a highly specifically general sport put tension on the muscle rest and grow. That's it. But if we're talking about longevity for normal people, they want to move better. Right. So you see a lot of bodybuilders aesthetically, they look amazing. Like externally, they look great internally. They're a compensation fucking asymmetrical mess. And do you know, like you, you bodybuild, right. And you know, a lot of bodybuilders, how many bodybuilders do you know that go man I feel great all the fucking time Not that many Not that many especially definitely powerlifters as well Powerlifters are always completely Sometimes ailment or injury or spending about 30 minutes before the training session with like some big metal device. Only a big heavy device just trying to get limber enough to do something. And but that's that's also the stuff we don't talk about that stuff. Right. We talk about drug use and we talk about what you need to do to get there. But nobody talks about all the aches and pains you get and the cost of doing business for that. And if you were to ask a gen pop client, okay, would you, you want to put on 15 kilos of muscle and you want to put a hundred kilos on your squat? Are you okay doing that? And also having back pain, neck pain, knee pain, having a, taking 15 minutes to get off the shitter. They're going to say no. Like they, they're like, okay, let's scale down your expectations and figure out what you want to do. what you're telling me is you don't really care about 15 kilos you want to look better right yeah you want to be unfat yeah you want to be strong enough but you don't want to fuck up your joints getting there correct all right that takes a little bit of a different frame of mind yeah yeah as if you're just taking there there's a big difference between you know when you're maybe in your first few years of training and you know you're getting you're getting stronger and you're excited to go into the gym and hit pure and then like you get like fucking 10 years down the line and you're like scared for about an hour before you go to the gym because you might hit the pure or you might die like you don't talk about that too much and it's like does the general population person want to just be like nervous that they might snap themselves in half before they go to the gym most of the time anytime you get like an inquiry form from somebody who has like a more kind of like general goal and it could be like you know related to improving their health and um you know improving longevity is like i don't want to get injured i want to reduce i want to reduce my chance of injury it's like you know you can't completely prevent it but at the same time there's definitely gonna be some stuff definitely ways to train which are could potentially increase the risk of that happening you know striving for top end one rms and striving for like you know definitely in the like so tree rep range is definitely a kind of area where yeah pop up more yeah because i was thinking i was actually thinking when you sent me the, when you sent me the, the questions you want to talk about the topics you want to talk about, I was thinking about like, cause you get, people get so much conflicting information. It's like, all right, so stretching doesn't reduce injury and this doesn't reduce injury. And you know, there's no such thing as perfect technique. If you're doing perfect technique, you're not hitting your, you know, you're not hitting your potential, but then it's like, okay, if, if we, if we had to wager and I said, all right, use really good technique, like super technique and not get too trashy with your lifts most of the time, or fuck it, just full send it no matter how you get the bar up, which one would you bet on to be the one that would cause you an injury eventually probably lifting like trash. It's like people, people who lift like trash, they tend to just their ego lifting and they're not patient. It's like, you're going to get that PR at some point. Like what's the difference of taking another eight weeks versus like full sending it right now and then blowing out your knee. Yeah. I think like with the technique thing I think one of the maybe misconceptions people have is like that say for example something like on a squat a set of 10 like eight of those reps will look pretty much kind of look pretty much the exact same and then maybe two reps will look slightly different but like the range of difference when you get good at squatting is is minuscule right it's just like maybe slight deviation maybe your knee kind of caved in tiny bit maybe your hips shot back a tiny bit like just as you're kind of getting closer to like the top end the big difference is if from rep number one to rep number 10 there's wide variations in how that looks then that's probably something that needs to be addressed through a variation or regression or something like that um because i think sometimes when people think of like perfect technique good technique sometimes to also kind of limit them from maybe getting to a place where they're actually getting more kind of effective sets or worthwhile sets in and it kind of gets them into this bubble of i need to strip it back i need to reduce the weight to like make this quote unquote perfect but then it's like perfect technique but maybe not stimulating them to like they've got the the range of motion they've got the joint mobility they've access to like those range of motion but they're just not getting strength benefit because maybe they're not lifting heavy enough maybe they're not training closer or close enough to failure to get a hypertrophy benefit i think I think that's where some people fall down on the technique side of things. Yeah, so what I'll usually tell clients is we have an acceptable deviation from technique and that's also gonna be dependent on what we're doing. So if it's a beginner, they get stimulation just from walking into the gym. They don even have to do that much Just walking in the gym and doing a set even at a high RAR they going to grow now at some point as you become more advanced and your training age goes up you going to have to go you need more stimulus so you're going to have to go a little closer and a little closer but the difference is with a beginner if something goes sideways they can't they usually can't recover so if they get too far off and they keep they do a junky rep the next rep gets a little more junky than a little more junky. And the next thing you know, the bar falls off their back. So it's like, all right, let's create a percentage range here. So when you feel one rep that feels significantly different than the other ones, we're done. Once you become more advanced, you go, okay, you got two or three grindy reps that you can go through before technique is going to really fall down because the more advanced you get, you can stay in the pocket better. Like that's the thing, Like they have less fear of the lifting. And when they stop in a movement or they slow down, they can usually grind it up without getting too far out. So that's the way I'll usually do it. So like, and I look, something I learned from Andre Benoit was like, you get one shitty rep, like, but not too shitty. Like you don't want to hit 10 reps. And that 11th one is just all over the place. Okay. We're done by that point because the goal is to get, you know, as close to failure as possible. And to me, it's as close to technical failure. So, you know, people talk about task failure and all this other, you know, they come up with all these new terms. I just say technical failure. Be stuck in the moment of your lift. Don't worry about what I'm doing. Worry about what you're doing. Feel the lift. How does it feel? How's the speed? How does your foot pressure feel? How do you feel in space and time? And I try to get them more conscious of getting an understanding of spatial awareness and where their body is and what the weight feels like. so then when they feel a rep that's a little off okay i think that's it all right cool because we can always add another set if we need to get another stimulatory rep we can add another set or like let's say it's a back squat maybe we just use that for general strength general hypertrophy but we're going to follow that off with maybe some hack squats where you're more you have some external stabilization you can full send it on that and you're not likely to get hurt unless something like a catastrophic accident happens and then throw on a leg extension so now you have like kind of a good global strength movement general strength movement of a back squat something like that now you go to a machine movement where you have more stabilization you can full send it to complete failure even beyond and then you tidy it off with some knee extension and that's a pretty solid workout yeah i guess like one thing was it what's going to ask you about as well as like um I guess the process before we get under the bar, right? So I guess like my approach to warm has always been pretty short and quick. Efficient, I call it. So I've always pretty much just like came into the gym. If I had to do any kind of movement prep, like say, for example, if I felt like my hips are tight, I might do some like single leg gordials, hip airplanes to kind of get some access into internal and external rotation. but you know it's not that i just get underneath the bear and like you know start with 20 kilos or body weight squat 20 kilos and just work my way up however i do quite often find that for a lot of people that approach doesn't work a lot like all that all that well uh especially if they are kind of maybe having a job where they're like century trade today they're not moving all that much and definitely for the people who are just like new to training and like you know i've been training since been 15 so you know that could very much be all i need to really kind going to perform well but for somebody who's just kind of starting off in the gym like you know or kind of like our average individual who's walking in what type of things would you be considering for that person before they get like underneath a squat bar yes there's a lot the first thing are you actually warm so is it five in the morning and you just woke up and you had a coffee and a shit and then got in the car and drove to the gym probably a good idea to get warm so maybe get on a treadmill or get on a cross trainer and go for like 10 or 15 minutes and just try to get a little bit of a sweat. Like don't try to turn it into a marathon, but just get the joints, just get everything, the muscles warm and ready. The second thing is, you know, if we, if we get under the bar, let's get on the bar that I basically use the movements as their own warmups. So get under the bar with just the bar and see how that feels or get under the bar with like 50% of your first work set. See how it feels. If it doesn't feel good, then we're probably going to do something else. So this is where stretching can actually help, even though people go, Oh, you can't stretch before you train. Well, if you can't get into the position for the movement and it's either, well, we do a different movement or we find a way to get into position. So if you, if you are like married to the idea of doing whatever exercise it is and you can't get there, well, maybe we can do something that's going to help increase range of motion. Is it going to affect how much load you can use on a bar Yes but it a it a paltry amount It like you losing what five or 10 big fucking deal If you take it to failure who cares You providing the tension anyways So you know we use something like what we came up with was backloaded structural balance, where we might do a couch stretch. We might do a kneeling hip flexor stretch, just get, get the quads to calm down a little bit. So they're not fighting you on the way down. And we find that it's very effective, but usually if they've been pre-qualified for a movement, unless they've like not been in the gym for a couple of weeks or they've been sitting at a desk a lot they shouldn't have any problem just warming up like general warm-up and then using the movement to warm yourself up but when you go back to like beginners or people that have a long layoff let's say your idea is to do a back squat today and you get on the bar and it looks junky you can't hit depth you're all over the place maybe the back squat's not a good idea right now Let's figure out some type of other triple flexion movement. So maybe we try some split squats first and just see how you go with that. Spend a few weeks doing split squats, get everything nice and loose. Use the couch stretch and hip flexor stretch with it as well. And then go to phase two, add your back squats in there and see if that's cleared all that. But the problem is people get married to married to exercises and they're like, I have to do this exercise. You don't like you can find if it's not working today or it hasn't worked for a few sessions. it's really easy to just make some type of similar but different substitution that allows you to move in the same movement pattern because we can always go back to that exercise. People see stuff on paper and they go, I have to do it like this. They look in their app and they go, okay, I have to do this. No, no, no. If that movement's not safe today and it's not working and your hips are a bit grindy or your lower back's grindy, let's find something else that still hits everything in a similar manner than what you're looking for, especially if it's bodybuilding because, again, bodybuilding is just put tension in muscles. It's like if you want to think about the most caveman fucking sport you can do, it's bodybuilding. It's like everything works. If it's sports performance, we have a different conversation because one of the things you ask is like, what about training myths? Like you have to do this. Well, if you're a powerlifter, you have to bench squat and deadlift. There's no way around that. So, yes, you have to do this. If you're a weightlifter, you have to snatch and clean and jerk. there's no way around that but for everything else the bodybuilding physique stuff general health and fitness there are no rules of what you have to do there's just there's probably good things you should do but your options are a lot more open when you're talking about things that are very general in nature like that yeah i think the you have to do these exercises or assumed exercises that you need to do by a lot of people are you know they are the classic barbell lifts and what i do think that like we should all have the ability to be able to perform them because god if we can all we can all remember the lockdowns yeah and how being able to actually move in like that kind of uh that time like that really such a lot of people so if you were only were doing like leg press leg extension and then all of a sudden you have to learn how to back squat you know yeah it's a good it's a good skill to have we had a lot of like during lockdowns we had a lot of new clients that came over because um some of our colleagues that were training them that they didn't have any equipment and those colleagues only knew how to use barbells dumbbells cables and machines so now they came to us because we understand gymnastics and calisthenics training so we ended up training get training a lot more people that way because we they didn't understand how to manipulate a program when you don't have any equipment at all yeah i was working as a personal trainer in like a commercial gym so like a lot of the classes i would have been teaching would have been you know classic uh like pump classes with very very low weight so like from that my programming would have gotten pretty creative if you still like be able to kind of use different kind of training variables other than just load you know to still kind of give people effective programs and it definitely improved like my skill set a lot as as a coach and like to be honest my business actually did quite well sorry sorry to everybody else out there who had a bad time during it but for some of us it was good time um but um yeah like they kind of the need the need the need to do exercises you made a really good point there in regards to like you know you couldn't just switch to something else if it feels better on a day and the exercises programmed feels worse or even like another kind of context for this is like you know you're training you're training at that like 6 a.m period right and go to the gym the gym is rammed and the exercise you're meant to do is is like you know the machine's full or something like that right like if it if you can't do it like a machine press you'd give a dumbbell press to go or you'd give a single arm dumbbell press to go like you know it

just has to be okay what type of muscle am i using what type of movement pattern am i using here and like you know how can i load that if you're not not able to do your cable lat raises and take up the dual cable stack you just do dumbbell lateral raises so like you can use in in all contexts whether it's like a mobility issue where something doesn't feel good that day or just like you know you need to get in a certain type of movement pattern but the exercise again the machine is taken up you know what type of what's the next best option to this of course just take a tiny bit of like uh education knowledge but like you know if you're a coach they will be able to give you like different options and that's something from time to time i'll do you know for people who are in these kind of situations i'll write down like you know alternative exercises besides the actual exercises yeah 100 it's like i mean i have clients that live in the middle of nowhere. They have a squat rack, adjustable bench, plyo box, weightlifting set, couple of kettlebells and some dumbbells. So it's like, they don't even have access to a gym. So most of the stuff, most stuff I actually write for our online training, our general online training, because we have one-on-one stuff. And then we have just general templated stuff for people who don't want the cost or want to train themselves. And I write all of that stuff for barbell and dumbbell, because there's not a gym in the world you're going to go to that doesn't have those two things. Now, if somebody does sign up for those programs and they're in a massive, fully kitted out gym, cool. You've got all the toys. Great. This is a physique program. You're doing machines, right? Because if you want to do physique, there's no real inherent reason to do back squat, bench press and all that, unless you just really like it or you're like, I want to bench squat deadlift and I want to bodybuild. I'm like, cool, like we can do that. But they have to have options for that. yeah yeah having the options on your program i guess is the as you said it's going to be very much down to what you have available like um last year i was living in canada and i was training in ever hear pure muscle of fitness no no it's like it's kind of like the gold's venice of canada it's like 36 000 square foot gym they have about 20 leg presses in one room and like you know jesus they've they've every machine that you could think of and they have like multiple multiple of them but like that type of gym they're like you know as big as it was and no matter how many people was in it you always were able to do the exercise that was on your program because you're just like every single one of those machines whereas like now the gym in live in spain and like you know like most gyms has one leg extension one leg press which is a bit of a a bit of a change and like now that i'm doing bodybuilding i guess i'm trying to follow my program as best i can i definitely find it i'm waiting a lot longer for uh for equipment and whereas i used to do powerlifting i go to the squat rack and nowadays nobody uses squat racks nobody uses bench press nobody really is using free free weights again that comes back to the people getting too much from just bodybuilding and just just machine-centric muscle-centric and movements and i think a lot of people as a result they're kind of like they're probably missing out on some things but that's like definitely one thing that i used to always really appreciate about about doing the powerlifting training is that like you go anywhere in the world and not have to worry about like you know not having the leg extension with this certain resistance profile that i will use because then i can track my progressive overload or whatever like that right i guess like um one thing with with the with being able to do a lot of the barbell lifts too is i i i find there's there's a good cross transfer to your ability to push harder on machine-based movements or like other other movements too i think it allows you to kind of access a different level of intensity that definitely when you go over to a leg press just feels a lot easier doesn't matter if it's the same or p or p then the squat feels different or P10 on leg press. I'm a big believer in everything has its place. And everybody's on a different part of their journey. So I always tell young guys, look, I know it's like in vogue to use machines and barbell stuff's out of vogue. But I would plead with you to start with the barbells, dumbbells, start with three-dimensional based movement before you move the machines and just build just a raw, massive piece of flesh. Then go to the machines after that, or then use machines for things you simply can't get out of freeway. So like a leg curl. Like not a lot of people are going to rep out glute ham raise, and they're not going to rep out Nordic. So it's like, okay, seated leg curl, lying leg curl, standing leg curl, kneeling leg curl. Those are all good because they're easier to scale that. So there's some things that are just going to be way better with a machine because you can really train them effectively with your body But when you looking at bodybuilding it an aesthetic sport So it more it just as much art as it is science So if you were a sculptor and you got hired, you were hired to build something out of a piece of granite. First thing you get is a big piece of granite. Well, where do you get that? We get it from a granite quarry. What do they do? They use dynamite and bulldozers and shit to blast out a big piece of rock. Use the big shit for a few years to just get a big, raw, nasty, like 70s power builder body, then start chipping away and you get your chisels out and start chipping it away with the machine stuff. And the other thing with the machines, if you have injuries, machines are a good choice because you can stabilize, especially if it's a stability or a joint issue. You can almost always set up a machine to work around that. But the problem with that is people will just constantly try to work around their issues. They won't try to fix their issues. And then all of a sudden they get on that machine last week. It was fine. Now they hurt in any position that machine. So they try to find a different machine and they keep working around things until they run out of options and then they can't lift at all. And I see this all the time. I was talking to one of my coaches this morning with a client that just came on for customized training. He's the same thing. He just did a lot of bro bro stuff. And now his shoulders all jacked up, his knees all jacked up and he's run out of options he goes i can't do anything with his shoulder this knee like okay you're gonna have to fix it now or you're gonna fix it later it's a lot easier to fix it like preemptively and not get to that point where you've now run out of a lot of options with rehab stuff like that right where you do have to fix something and like whether it is like you know your hip shoulder whatever back i guess like a lot a lot of people especially who are maybe kind of more average trainees they without seeing a physio they might just think i should just uh you know just take time off the gym wait for it to heal and sometimes then when they're doing rehab a lot of people just poorly rehab injuries because they just don't implement their rehab work either consistently or they don't do it like you know properly so i guess like if you have a client who's working with you and they kind of you know they have something happen in their lower back for example right very very common thing to happen they're doing it that left and all of a sudden they just feel something go and you need to kind of factor in some type of rehab process maybe this is going to linger around for like last two weeks so just a kind of like leaving the area to just chill out hasn't really kind of helped how are you kind of factoring in some type of work into the program to kind of ensure that they are doing it And, you know, make sure it's not boring. Yeah, man. And I've got another story from this morning. Same guy, right? So we're looking at his progress pictures or his first initial pictures. Massively overextended in the back, stomach sticking out. Guy's really lean, but looks like he has a gut because he's so jacked up. So forward hip posture. It's what I call Michael Jackson lean. So locked knees and hips are in front of the ankle. So it looks like Michael Jackson's smooth criminal. and then the ribs are posteriorly rotated and they're leaning back from the thorax. So the first thing we're going to do, we want to start working on his core and trying to get his abs stronger to pull the ribs back towards the hips and straighten out the lower back. And the same thing, he can't do deadlifts. We have him testing on deadlifts. He's like, when I deadlift, it just rips my lower back. I'm like, yeah, I can see that from your pictures. So we're going to have to address this. But the guy was also really clear. I like the way I train. I don't want to do anything different. So I'm like, okay, so we can't do the normal stuff. We're going to have to sneak in some things that are bodybuildery type stuff that he'll do until we earn his trust. And once we earn his trust, you give it four to six months, we'll earn his trust that he'll start doing some of the weird shit we need him to do to actually fix it and take it seriously. So, you know, what are we, we're looking at, you know, spinal flexion. What do we need to do? Well, we need to get into spinal flexion. How do we do that. We need to work on the obliques and need to work on the abs to, to crunch. Okay. What's a good bodybuilder movement that he won't know that we're trying to sneak rehab in. He just thinks it's his ab development movement. Let's do a kneeling cable crunch, or let's do a Swiss ball or Bosu ball crunch, something like that and get him to work on it. Cause he does like three sets of abs a week. I'm like, let's pump that up to like training it like a real muscle 10 to 12 sets or so. And then really specifically try to rotate the hips back and rotate the ribs back. So we can sneak some of that in. And then you just sprinkle it, you do what you can, like the guy's not in a massive amount of pain. It's, it's almost all basically when he lifts. So I'm like, okay, right now it's when you lift, if you keep doing this, eventually it's going to be like when you're going to the gym, then it's going to be when you get out of your chair, then it's going to be all the fucking So we'll throw in that. We try to find something that sneaks in some external rotation because he his left shoulder really internally rotated So well this is a type of guy like you not going to see a lot of bodybuilders wanting to do external rotation work So let's work on something like an L-lateral raise to external rotation or a face pull to external rotation. Those are all normal exercises. So we try to sprinkle in things that are very familiar, but then we don't tell them we're trying to fix this stuff until it starts feeling better. when he goes, oh, my left shoulder is actually getting an external rotation. It feels good. Yeah, that's that exercise. Oh, that was a rehab exercise I gave you, but I hid it inside of a bodybuilding exercise. So you just try to, I don't want to say manipulate, but that's kind of what it is. Because we gave him lower trap raises and external. There's no way he's going to fucking do that stuff. So some people will, some people won't. So you just kind of have to hide your veggies inside of a protein shake for them. It's a good analogy there. yeah like um i think like you know when personal trainers are learning maybe more so about like this side of things initially that looks like here like the big the mcgill big tree and like that's like you know just your recipe to give to somebody who has back pain and just tell them to just do that for like maybe 10 days or something like that and then come back in the gym we can get you deadlifting again but like as you said there i guess yeah look looking at number one how they are actually lifting and then as like as you're saying there from like the progress pictures like you know seeing how they're just they're just standing i guess that kind of issue michael jackson criminal physique that's a that's a very that's a very common one like i guess like the more people i've worked with over the years like there's like two big common things i see all the time when people are training is like number one they can't hinge um they just can't hinge effectively they just don't know how to use their hips it's all like lower back movement and then as well like when it comes to if they're squatting like they just have immense trouble hitting depth and so much of that comes from that type of posture where they just they don't know how to control their midsection they don't know how to obviously they've never thought about moving their being pelvis or moving their their rib cage and then once you kind of start to bring this into the equation they're like you know once you get them to learn how to actually kind of keep those those areas stacked a lot of the issues start to resolve and you know i guess it is just like one of those overlooked aspects right because i don't know why it's overlooked to be honest i guess it's it's complicated it requires a little bit more kind of like digging to get into well you get a lot you get a lot of conflicting information right so you go in the physio world and they go oh don't you don't need to worry about anterior pelvic rotation and back extension all this stuff just learn how to move correctly i'm like well it's not really that helpful like i get what you're saying with this, and I get some of it's neurological and well, most of it's neurological, but there could be things like prior acute injuries or long-term chronic injuries that are locking them into this position. It could be that something's in pain. Like they may have a disc herniation that's creating a movement to get away from that, the side of pain. It could be a lot of stuff, right? Um, but normally when I see those types of issues, you're going to see if If we're going to use like an anterior pelvic tilt or anterior pelvic rotation, you're going to see that from a standing position, they're already in some hip flexion. They just stand in hip flexion a little bit, even like five or 10 degrees, sometimes 15. That's automatically going to destroy their depth because anterior rotation drives internal rotation. If you have internal rotation and you don't have that space, when you go down to the bottom, you're going to run out of room. And so something has to rotate, but you can't rotate where the normal places are. So other things have to rotate. So you have to start to posteriorly rotate the hips early. Then that runs out, and then you have to flex the lower back in order to get posterior rotation to get the hips out of the way of the femurs. So, like, there's a lot of shit going on, but people will argue this and say static posture doesn't matter. And I'm like, of course it does. If you have a fucked up static posture, it's not going to get any better when you get under a bar, right? So if someone can't fully extend the hips and they're locked in some slight hip flexion, putting a bar on your back is not going to reinforce extension. It's probably going to push them forward anteriorly and create more flexion, which is going to fuck up their depth. So we're going to have to massively modify the movement to allow them to get their femurs out of the way. Or we're going to have to add a heel elevation. We're going to have to modify something. Or we can do all that and we can try to fix it. Yeah. but people will argue with this stuff left and right and like i'm telling you because i've seen it a bazillion times you know if you if your static posture is everything else is going to get there's your dynamic posture is going to be too unless you're an athlete because then you athletes are master compensators and they're resilient in compensations but normal people aren yeah it like i guess a lot of people just don have awareness of like what what their resting posture is resting posture is and i guess like some of it is can also be down to you know how people train or or lack of training as well like you know like you know again you're kind of sitting at a desk all day and you're just like betting to your laptop like that like you stay in that position for long enough like you know you will kind of develop a more kind of like a wrestling posture like that because like something that is very familiar to to your body so you know probably just kind of kind of get and get stuck in in that position and think that as well like you know if you're the classic guy who just wants to come into the gym and like you know and get in shape a lot of guys if they don't have like any kind of guidance coming into it what's their kind of first thing they're going to be doing something like this all day and they're like okay i'm going to go in and do chest i'm going to do bench press and they they're just like in this like four position and they don't know how to like retract your shoulder blades or anything like that and all of a sudden they're just like stuck in that position they're training that position they're spending that entire day in the position and all the while their their back muscles are so underdeveloped that's insane and across cross transfers to somebody other uh like exercise too like so if you have that like kind of forward kind of posture i guess like getting under back to squat it's gonna be pretty damn difficult you know you're gonna be you're you're well you're gonna have a hard time hitting that but like that's at least two problems i think yeah like you said even getting under the bar like even grabbing the bar, trying to get an abduction, external rotation, grab the bar. If you're forward, you lose all that. Like if you push your shoulders forward and you try to abduct the shoulder, you're going to feel impingement. If you try to go into shoulder flexion, you're going to feel impingement. So it's like we, if, but your brain is, your brain is really intelligent about this as far as like saving energy. It wants to save as much energy as possible. So the position you're in most of the time, it's going to start creating link tension issues. It's going to create different patterns that hold you in that position because it doesn't want to spend calories holding that. So it creates these resting postures. Then when you try to take that resting posture and make it active, you start losing joint range of range of mobility and you start losing flexibility. And then it gets really difficult to get in the positions you need to get into without heavily modifying something. But, you know, people, it's difficult to get people, at least like I train mostly coaches, like my roster is probably 85, 90% coaches and 10% gen pop. It's way easier to get the gen pop people to do the things they need to do than to get the coaches to do it because the coaches want to go in there and smash themselves. And the gym pop people don't know any better. So everything's really hard for them. So like, Oh, this is dinky exercise is really fucking hard. And I just write it in the program and I'm like, cool. And then once we get, once we clear everything, we'll start putting bigger shit in and removing all that stuff but it's training coaches as fuck i went into it thinking it was going to be really easy i can training coaches way harder than training normal people yeah well like i i even i even know myself like anytime i like i usually work i usually work with a coach and i always have to like try to bite my tongue and just try to act as if i don't know anything when i'm following on the following program because you know you get to you get to a certain level where you've been working in the industry for a long time just like spend a decent amount of like money on education you know you know your stuff and then you're like why are you writing it like this why are you putting the rep range like this why why are you structuring like the kind of training sequence like this and like just like just shut up you're paying this person so that they can guide you towards somewhere where you want to go if you just continue to do things the way that you've been doing them or the way that things make sense to you you may not get there because that may be what you've been doing to get where you are right now where you need a coach well look i don't think it's a bad thing to question them because your coach should be able to justify everything they do if i have a client that says why are we doing this i'll give them a full explanation of why now if i give you that explanation and then you start substituting exercises or doing your own thing or you complain about the exercise because i don't feel the muscle working and i'm like this isn't a muscle centric movement this is a fix your fucking shoulder movement right so it's like you should have the you should have the luxury of being able to ask for an explanation but now you have to you have to you have to dig deep and go does that explanation make sense is there something that that this person knows that i don't okay now i'm going to investigate that like oh shit that makes a lot of sense i'll just shut up and try it oh yeah for sure like that thing you have the justification there is important of like you know even when i'm when i'm writing a program and after i finish writing the program i'm like i have to like look back and be like okay i have to like i'll give myself a reason why i'm after right reference like this you know especially like like you know writing a parallelist program like you know it's so specific towards like you know going through like a prep phase where you're going into a peak and stuff like that and it very much has to make sense towards getting on the platform on that day to peak on time but like

I think for me where it occurs for me not like maybe not questioning my coach it's not that I don't question the coach I'm not saying that I'm more so saying uh questioning at the point or at the point of detriment right so like again like you'll be the case where like you're kind of getting the justification but you're like ah well that justification doesn't make sense to me or I've read this so I'm just going to continue doing this and maybe then you don't tell them And I think sometimes like, you know, I coach these coaches too, and you know, sometimes they can be kind of bottlenecks that you kind of run into is like, you know, you learn something new and anytime we learn something new, especially when like, you know, here, here in a podcast, I think a lot of us can fail to recognize that we have very much now a surface level understanding of a topic. And we don't understand how maybe this specific piece of information fits into the whole piece of the puzzle. And that's when it becomes like, okay, we need to know more before we start to implement it versus we implement it now. And then this has a cascading effect across everything else. Yeah. And look, that's the thing. It's like, I like chess. I play chess. I'm not that great. But I watch chess games and I watch people talk about it. And it's like when you look at someone that's a beginner, they go one movement at a time. But then when you get really advanced, you're seeing multiple movements in the cascade of what's going to happen. So program design should be like that, right? So it's like, okay, if I move this piece here, what are the dangers? And then where can I attack or where can I defend? So you're always making these calculations, trying to see four or five steps ahead. So like cases, you might be doing a movement that doesn't make sense right now, but it's going to make sense like six months from now. And you've got to have that trust to be able to go, okay, all right, I see where we're going with this progression and what it's supposed to do. but it can be difficult because you're like well i would have fixed it this other way but we're a lot of times our own worst assessors because somebody else is it definitely doesn't have the blinders on that we see with ourselves and they can be a little bit more honest with a critique of hey this is fucked and you need to do these like 10 things in this sequence to fix this yeah yeah definitely having the objective either to kind of tell you what you need to hear versus just like you know i guess coddling to all your wants and desires um i guess like a question for you here because they want to kind of move on to the cardio stuff is like um what we say are some underrated movements that people could do it incorporating into into the program all right that you don't really see people doing within the gym but maybe have a decent proportion of your clients having done that movement at some point i mean i this is going to sound weird but i get my clients to do a lot of weightlifting movements a lot of olympic weightlifting movements and not that they're going to do the full movements but we do a lot of things like tall muscle snatches a lot of cuban presses cuban rotations um you know clean rotation stuff like that and i find those really helpful i use a lot of gymnastic stuff too like dislocates and various weighted shoulder extension shoulder flexion stuff so but like my demo most of my demographic i don't really train a lot of bodybuilders anymore um because i i'm a problem solver and with bodybuilding there's not really that many problems to solve unless there's like an injury or niggle or something like that because most of it's pretty straightforward like add tension eat eat a lot sleep a lot okay hey, starve yourself, keep lifting, you know, manage your fatigue and tension. But like with Gen Pop, they have so many different issues from being sedentary and messing themselves up or lifting improperly and messing themselves up. So there's a lot more mental masturbation and gymnastics that have to go into play. So I use a lot of stuff that I learned from Coach Christopher Sommer, gymnastic bodies. We use a lot of stretching in the workout, which people tell you is a no-no. But like I said, sometimes that's the way to get people into position. I do Olympic weightlifting, so I have them do some of those. So because I see the difference that makes with things like shoulder function and even like deadlifting, like most people will do conventional deadlift or they'll do what they think is conventional. But it's really like a round back deadlift from the floor. They're doing like a round back Romanian from the floor. but I don't see a lot of people except for Olympic lifters still doing a clean deadlift and a snatch deadlift where it's kind of a lower hip. And I find for a lot of back issues that fixes, if you, if you put your ego to the side, reduce the weight and learn how to clean and snatch deadlift properly, that fixes a lot of fucking back problems. But the issue is a lot of people want to add more weight to the bar, add more weight to the bar, even when it doesn't really make sense for their goals. they just trying to see how much they can lift They end up biasing the hamstrings They don have good strong hips and they end up with FAIs or anterior impingement in their hips They end up with lower back issues. They end up with neck issues and upper back stuff. So like I use a lot of old school shit that you wouldn't really see because a lot of the younger trainers don't study physical culture history. There's a lot of really cool older movements that are really good that, yeah you don't really see anymore yeah that speaks to experience of the game i'm being i'm being a student of the game because i could definitely do a kind of a looking into more of that stuff so i might kind of pick your brain after uh we finish up the call for some resources which i could look into it's it's funny because like there's a lot of movements that people they'll they'll they're doing right now and they'll they'll they'll think that they made up a movement and they'll put their name they'll attach their name to it or whatever and then I'll go pull out like Bill Pearl's Keys to the Inner Universe, which has a massive amount of exercise in it. It's an old school book. And I'll open it up and I'll find the exercise they're doing. I'm like, hey, we've had this exercise for fucking 40 years. Like, I don't know why it's new now. But there's a lot of stuff. That's an excellent book. If any coaches, Bill Pearl's Keys to the Inner Universe. That's an excellent book and has tons of old school exercises in it. Yeah. again it's one of those things when you exist in the bodybuilding world the powerlifting world you don't hear too much about like other kind of ways and like even something you mentioned there like you know the stretching uh being bad for performance or stuff like that like i think like there is a couple of there's a couple of studies god maybe maybe like up to 10 years ago now which they did very much like extreme stretching so like you know you're you're having people stretch for like 60 seconds up to like three minutes and that's just not how most people stretch you know most people stretching are already going to go up to 30 seconds or something like that especially if they're looking to like improve range of motion on an exercise or at a joint so you know naturally enough you hold any type of stretch for like 60 to 60 seconds three minutes you probably will feel as if you can't produce as much and that's the key to back lower structural balance because the purpose is to try to inhibit the muscle so it allows you to get in a better position but then if you want to look at producing power probably not a good idea because in a lot of those studies they did a long stretch on like quads and hip flexors and then they would immediately do a vertical jump of course power but what they mainly saw was it reduced power production not really strength so if you did and there's an easy way to get around that anyway. So if you did a, if you did some static stretching or I prefer PNF stretching because you get an immediate, uh, improvement in range of motion. So often I'll blend those two together depending on what I'm doing. So we might do, uh, three to five, uh, PNF stretches to see how far we can get range of motion. We might hold it for a static stretch just to kind of sink it in and then we'll go train. Uh, but you can easily get over that by just following it up with some ballistic or dynamic stretching right so just let's say you stretched out your hip flexors and your quads like a couch stretch and the kneeling hip flexor stretch go do some leg swings it'll ramp your nervous system back up and you're probably not going to see any that any noticeable reduction and most people training aren't strong enough to see a reduction anyways yeah very true you think mary muff mary muffin top's not going to notice a two kilo difference on her fucking squat like it's not gonna happen nor will she really care i guess if you're an elite level powerlifter i wouldn't do a fucking bickram yoga class and then go try to squat and deadlift yeah yeah i think like that probably some of the only people on the planet who probably would give a shit about not being able to lift at the two the extra two and a half kilos are probably powerlifters and they would they would make a 2200 character instagram post after explaining all the reasons why uh they're way down the thing all right so i want to kind of move with the cardio um because again this is you know i think cardio is getting a lot pop more popular now i don't know if high rocks is a thing in australia but it's it's getting there yeah yeah remember i go to europe a lot so i've got i know a lot about high rocks now yeah so like high rocks is like you know getting huge now and i think i i think it obviously has a lower barrier to entry than like crossfit did because like a lot of people just for probably themselves up from doing uh the olympic lifts not being taught correctly how to do them uh whereas obviously hierarchy a lot more kind of like you know just in general cardio it's kind of like a it's kind of like a circuit class that's like you know designed to be pretty like to be a lot harder more advanced but i think as there's a lot more people are getting into cardio uh probably still still the powerlifting world definitely you know that anything over eight reps i guess and then bodybuilding you know bodybuilders i think can be quite good for cardio but you know for for the average person you know like how would they uh start to kind of factor cardio into their week because i think i think as you're kind of keeping on the kind of health and longevity aspect like you know we probably should have a balance of cardiovascular work as well as strength training work because you know we need a heart we need a brain and a heart health and a set of a function like that kind of dictates a lot of the outcomes that we're gonna get from other other kind of endeavors they they always say you know cardio will kill your gains but you know what kills your gains really fast cardiovascular disease that really kills your gain so you that's something to think about and it's really it's all about the dose right dose makes the poison so and if if you're looking at like general health and you're going to prioritize, right? If you have high blood pressure, high resting heart rate, really shitty HRV, shitty blood pressure, you know, it's probably the car, cardio, especially lists and miss is probably your easiest, best low hanging fruit to do. So it's like, maybe you prioritize health first and, you know, reduce your weightlifting down to minimal effective dose, get your four to six sets on each body part per week or each movement, and then hammer the cardio and get your metrics in order. But metrics are usually what we're going to define. Firstly, for general health, it would be metrics. So it would be resting heart rate, blood pressure. I would even use sleep scores because what I noticed when I give people, when I first started prescribing cardio, you know, I come from a Polycom background, so like cardio was a Spanish for no-no. But it's like I tried to get all these guys to do cardio and they wouldn't do it, but they had all these issues like testosterone issues, libido issues, no energy issues, and they were all doing the same thing, three-to-one wave loading and hit sprints twice a week. I'm like, okay, well, that's not really working out for you right now, so why don't we try something different? Why don't we go back to, like, bro bodybuilding stuff and maybe do some cardio and see what happens? And they all had a complete 180 turnaround, and they started becoming a blues. This was over, like, 11 years ago when cardio was still, like, a no-no. But nowadays people are starting to do more, and people are getting the high rocks. But I think people started doing started getting the hybrid athlete type stuff earlier than that, like with like Alex Vieta and some of the other guys who run ultras and run marathons and do cycling. But they also can deadlift 600 pounds, you know. So a lot of these guys show that you can still be really strong and massive and you can still work on cardio as long as you program it correctly. But when you look at bodybuilding, bodybuilders will generally use it as a caloric funnel. I want to do more cardio so I don't have to starve myself as much. And then some people will actually need cardio to get lean like girls. A lot of girls like small women. There's this how much you're going to cut out of your diet. You can only cut so much out until cardio makes more more sense. Right. Or people that don't want to make a massive deficit, then they can use cardio as part of that deficit. As long as you don't compensate with the food and eat those calories back. and as long as you have the time for it because the problem with cardio is it's a time vampire. But I always prioritize it with our clients when they come in. We'll run them through a VO2 max test. We call it the junkyard dog VO2 max test. It's just a 12-minute cardiac output test, and we do some calculations to get a pretty good theoretical VO2 max. We'll also look at some of the numbers that can give us an idea of whether they're prioritizing more anaerobic or aerobic pathways so then we can dial in the cardio that way because some people don't actually need anaerobic. in order to get the aerobic system up. Most people need to focus on the aerobic stuff first. If we have a massively overweight client, we can't put them in HIIT intervals. Even though HIIT intervals are good, they can barely walk without huffing and puffing and having joint pain. So it's like we have to find the activities. So those are some of the decisions I'm thinking about, the questions I'm thinking about when I give them cardiovascular work. And we're always thinking adaptation first, caloric funnel secondarily to that. We should never just use cardio as a caloric funnel. It should be at least not initially. Initially, it's like, okay, do we need some cardiovascular adaptations? If so, how do we do that? We give them cardiovascular prescription. Later, like, especially for a bodybuilder, we might be ramping up cardio to act as that caloric funnel. But most people just use that as a caloric funnel full stop. And they don't think about the fact that there's all these really cool things that are happening physiologically by getting in better shape and pumping up your VO2 max. I guess I want to circle back to kind of two things there, right? So you talked about the metrics, likes of risk and outrate, blood pressure, sleep scores, HRV. What would be some kind of good targets for people to aim for on those And then the following question after that is like when you talk about cardiovascular adaptations like what what are these adaptations like what's happening that's like maybe like on a cellular level or like you know to your heart brain okay these kind of things all right so first let's talk about like the numbers right so it's pretty generally accepted now 120 over 80 for your blood pressure if you're below that you don't want be massively below that, but that's kind of a good set point. So it's like, I hate to say like the golden number, the golden number, at least based on the research I've seen is, uh, one, one, I think it's one 15 over 75 or something over 70. That's a pretty good, but if you can get below one 20 over 80, you're pretty sweet with that. You don't want to get too low. So like there are people that will come in that have really low blood pressure, especially like women, especially like sedentary women that okay they probably the aerobic might not be great because the blood pressure is always too low so we might actually use something like strong man or strong woman work up front like some type of loaded carries prowler pushes you know pulls and we'll use weight lifting to bring their blood pressure back up to try to normalize that plus nutritional stuff but um 120 over 80 is what you're looking at then with resting heart rate i like it to be in the fifties. If we can get it in the, if we can get at least under 62, I'm pretty happy with that. The literature, the best literature I've found says that optimal heart rate for people in shape is 45. Now that is not an easy number to hit. Um, that takes a tremendous way more work than most normal people are going to want to do. Um, and then the thing is like you're prioritizing most people, the priority probably should be lifting weights with cardio as I got a side health hustle. So to do the amount of cardio and stress reduction or stress management you would need to get your heart rate to 45, it's just not practical, even though that seems to be optimal for longevity, at least for what we know right now. But I've seen usually the best, easiest way, if you can get under 62, preferably in the high 50s, you're doing really well. And man, people sleep better that way. They sleep like champions. They have way less stress. They have more resilience to stress. If they have a stress episode, they don't tend to skyrocket their blood pressure, their heart rate from that. HRV can be finicky because it depends on like what what measuring scoring system and what technology you're using. So I don't really use HRV that much anymore just because you don't know what people are using. You're using an Apple watch, using a lead HRV, using a Garmin Fitbit. It can be all over the place. If people have those, then I'll work with that. But each of those systems have slightly different numbers you're looking at. But the easiest ones to understand is resting heart rate and blood pressure. That's super easy to understand, right? Now, some of the physiologic effects you get, okay, more angiogenesis, meaning you're building more capillaries, you get more blood flow. That's going to be helpful for basically reducing blood pressure and moving blood around the body. Also for fat loss, because one of the problems with fat, especially in stubborn areas, is just simply getting blood flow there to get the fat out. Right. And to get nutrients back in. You have increased mitochondrial biogenesis, which means you're going to increase the amount and the health and the the age of your mitochondria. OK, the more healthy mitochondria you have, you reduce inflammation. You can process more fuel faster. That will that will simply get your VO2 max up as well. You also see local adaptations in like most of what we talked about is like global conditioning effects, cardiovascular system effects. resizing the heart. So a lot of people that have high stress, left ventricle, the chamber will get really thick to push more because they don't have vessels that will dilate enough. So they get high blood pressure and that damages the vessels, especially the arteries. So it will increase arterial dilation. We'll also increase the chamber that's inside the left ventricle to kind of balance out that muscle thickness. Because the problem really is the muscle gets thicker, but the chamber doesn't expand. So you're pulling blood in there, but you're not pushing a lot of blood anymore. So your heart rate has to go up to try to perfuse enough blood. If I can expand that internal chamber, I can pull with more blood. Now my heart doesn't have to beat as much because it's pushing more blood, right? I mean, even for the brain, like you get an increase in BDNF, which is it creates increase in neurogenesis. So it actually, it makes you more smarter. We'll say, right. So you can, you've see increases in IQ by doing aerobic activity. Like a lot of this stuff can be done with anaerobic as well, especially hit interval training. But the problem with hit interval training is you can't do it a lot and it has to be super intense. So if you're not willing to work hard, it's,

It's not really going to work that well for you. And it's like, you can't like, you can't do a full leg session every fucking day. Like you can do an hour of heavy squats every single day. Right. It's the same thing with hit training. If you're doing it right, you got maybe two sessions tops a week and maybe three for two to three week blocks of time when you're getting over a plateau, if you have the work capacity and the recovery for it. Yeah. After a hit training session, the first few days, if they're not, i'm never doing that again and then you eventually get the amnesia to be like okay i gotta do if that's not your kind of mindset after doing it then you're probably not doing it hard enough i think a lot of people just they i think it a lot of issue with like the hit kind of cardio is a lot of people just like they use very very short rests so that they're just they just turn and end up turning into aerobic work you know that's right yeah i mean that's a it's a good sneaky way with people who won't do aerobics, it's a good way of getting them to do aerobics is just give them like a really small work to rest interval. And the first couple of minutes, it's going to be massively anaerobic, but then as, as they keep going, it then turns into aerobic. So that's a good way. Like give them 20 minutes of like 30 on 30 off. And after about three or four minutes, it's mostly aerobic anyways. Yeah. Yeah. As you were saying earlier, kind of hide the vegetables and i guess like um so i guess we have like the likes of hit we've got steady state like what would be some kind of general i guess um programming strategies that you kind of factor into somebody who's just kind of getting getting used to gym like kind of general population yeah so what i like is if we want to get them to do do more uh beginners probably not going to train five, six days a week with weights and they don't really need it. Like they, they, a very low level of stimulation is worth a lot more in a beginner than it is an advanced person. So if you have somebody training, say three full body workouts a week or an upper lower split that alternates every week, that gives you, you know, a good four days or maybe even seven, if they'll do the work of doing cardio, the nice thing about lists and, and, and to some point, uh, miss or moderate intensity, you don't really need to recover from it unless you're doing an excessive amount. If you're doing 30, 45 minutes a day, even up to an hour a day, you're not really going to have that much recovery. You just need to make sure that you're not driving too big of a deficit. So like, let's say somebody sets out their, their TDEE at 3000 calories and they chip 500 off to start losing four or 500 grams of weight a week. And then they add another 500 calories of cardio a day, they're going to get real fatigued really quickly, but it's not really, it doesn't really have anything to do with the conditioning. It has to do with they have a thousand fucking calorie deficit. So it's like, remember, you don't have to use it as a caloric funnel. So if you're using it for the adaptations up front, you could set your calories at say 3000 and just use the, the, the cardio as your deficit, because now you're still in a 500 calorie deficit. It's easier to pull calories, but pulling calories isn't necessarily going to give you the benefits that you're going to get from the conditioning. So it's like, OK, maybe if I have a new beginner and they're like, I don't mind doing 45 minutes of cardio a day. I'm like, OK, that's going to be for you, like, say, 300 calories a day. All right. So instead of 3000, we're going to eat 2800 and then the cardio is going to be 300 more calories. cool now we have a 500 calorie deficit um and and we get all the cool beneficial effects of increasing um endurance and increasing cardiovascular capacity yeah i think with the with the cardio i think it's just a lot of people maybe kind of struggle to kind of keep consistent with it i think it's more so because of how monotonous it can be when you're actually in it but i think that's where kind of using some of those more kind of fun strategies as you kind of mentioned with the the kind of fake the fake hit intervals or even just getting creative with like how you do program it so like i guess it doesn't always have to be you know you're on the bike for the next 30 minutes or on the cross train or whatever like that it could be like you know kind of circuits or could even be sometimes what i'll get like clients do if they're if they're really struggling to do it like by themselves i'll just suggest they go to like a class in like they're in their gym like it's is it exactly what like you know i would be i would ideally program maybe not because like you know yourself sometimes you go into a gym and i guess it's how i was taught to how i was taught to give classes or the conditioning classes make it so hard that they don't complain yeah it's too easy but sometimes you can train alongside that that can be you know cause other issues it's so weird these days because like if you were if if you were getting ready for a marathon and you had to train for like 90 minutes to two hours in cardio I could I that before Uh I done that for like rapid fat loss but not for like training for a marathon cause I not crazy I'm not built for a marathon. So I would never do one. It's just weird. Cause it's like 45 minutes, set up your iPad or your phone and like watch YouTube or watch a movie like it's the easiest, but you do get some people like, it's just so boring. I'm like, okay, well circuit training, either circuit training or a class, as long as the class isn't pushing them harder than what we need, because if we're looking at LIS, you've got LIS, MIS, and HIS, they all have their place. If we truly want, like, let's say somebody has high blood pressure, I probably don't want them doing moderate to high intensity steady state. I probably want to stick to LIS, which means, okay, we're going to get heart rate up to like 120, 140, and we're going to try to hold that the whole time. If you go over 140, I want you to dial it back. That's hard to do in a class. but then if they can, if they can regulate themselves and they don't get caught up in the moment, cause you know how it is in those classes, people get caught up in the energy. And next thing you know, they're in a heaping mess, sweaty mess on the floor. It's like, you gotta, you auto-regulate that shit and don't go quite as hard because we want to make sure that we're staying within the parameters of what you're, you can do your current capability. And if they go too hard, that's possibly going to affect like their weight training the next day and the the weight training is is just as important as the conditioning but in a situation where the metrics are fucked conditioning may have a priority over the weight training but the weight training is still so important they really they've got to do that too yeah so much to think about yeah there is there is there's quite a bit to all right yeah and i guess like one other thing that like people probably um they probably need to know i guess is like like cardio can also be progressed just the way your kind of weight training can be like you know of course if you've been using level 10 on the cross trainer for as long as you have been using the cross trainer like maybe that's like like there's a point when that level 10 was was kind of difficult to sustain for the time period that you're on the cross trainer whereas like yeah your body does get used to it like you know we do get the like mitochondrial adaptations and stuff like that and then it's time to maybe kind of up the ante there so i think that's like one thing i guess like you know i've always been very poor for doing cardio and i guess it was because i played a lot of sports when i was younger generally quite fit never really have any kind of issues resting heart rate is usually quite low so blood pressure is usually quite good and i never like even student powerlifting because it's kind of combining bodybuilding training with powerlifting you know doing set 15 something like squats would be fine you know be gas because it's just kind of like this stuff but like i could train after it for example right but when i when i was actually preparing for bodybuilding shows and even now um i'm doing cardio like i'm definitely noticing the the benefits to my sleep benefits to like even like my productivity and i think you mentioned like the bdnf like the brain derived neurotrophic factor like you just feel like more alert sharper uh after doing it and so like there is there's a like benefits that you can get because i guess you know even despite all sports there was like once i learned about steps i was like this like my out for like never really needed to do cardio because i just saw cardio as it's to burn calories it's not for health i guess when you're in your early 20s you could give a box about health you're probably doing two you're probably doing a lot of stuff in your early 20s that are probably counteractives here let's be real um but yeah Yeah, so I guess the point I was trying to get to was where do steps factor into this? Because I think steps are really popular now, and it's great that people are more conscious of that being a way to improve their overall activity levels and help out benefits too. But where would that factor into the cardio equation? Oh, man. So here's the thing. This goes back to what you said about being on level 10 on a cross trainer. At some point, steps aren't that effective. They're effective at first, especially if you're really out of shape. So if you're really out of shape, you get people, they walk and their heart rate's at 115, 120. But over the course of a few months, their heart rate's now like 90 while they're walking. So there's a clear loss, there's a clear diminishing return going on here. So this is at the point where I'm like, okay, so steps worked at first, but now we have to do a little bit more. Are we going to walk longer? Are you going to spend half your day fucking walking, trying to get 25,000 steps? Or can we just do some basic cardio to fill in some of those steps? So in a lot of cases, I'll give people, say, a step count. We'll say it's 12,000. I'll say, okay, let's see what you're getting on average. If you want to walk a little bit more, that's fine. But you get people that are sitting at a desk for eight hours a day and they may have to take the tube in to work and then take the tube back home They might be on they might be on the train for a fucking three hours a day If they look like say say you training somebody in London they could be living way out West or way out East And it takes them 90 minutes to get into work and 90 minutes to get home. It's like, where are you going to fit all these fucking steps in? They basically have 13 hours where they have to sit, you know? So, and they, you got, you got to sleep, you still got to wait train. So it makes sense from an economy perspective of, hey, we get the steps you can get and then fill in the rest with some type of cardiovascular activity. And then I'll usually try to find something they like to do. If you don't want to go to the gym and just get on a cross trainer or get on a treadmill, that's fine. I mean, maybe you stream a dance thing at home and learn how to Latin dance or some shit in your underwear in your living room or pull out the rollerblades or find something you like to do that allows you to get it in. And then you can usually equate the steps. If you go, well, you know, how many steps there's move spring, I think it's move spring.org. And there's a couple other calculators out like that, where you can put in like a steps to like, how many steps is rollerblading for an hour worth of rollerblading for 10 minutes. And you can go, okay, well, I need 4000 more steps that might be say, 25 minutes of rollerblading. I like rollerblading, I'm going to go out and do that instead. But the key is you have to have some type of progressive overload system because you're going to get used to whatever you're doing. You're going to get more fit, which means that exercise doesn't weigh as much as it did anymore. And the only way to make it weigh more is you have to do more of it, which is not really practical from a time management perspective, or you got to go harder. And with steps, you can only walk so fast before you have to, you have to start running. So it's like, all right, well, you were good at steps. I'm not a good runner, so I'm not going to run. So I'm going to go find something else. Oh, well, the cross trainer is really good. I'll get on a cross trainer, put it on level 10. Okay, and my heart rate's back where it needs to be. And when the heart rate drops down, now, okay, we've got to make a decision of increasing the level or increasing the RPMs. But it's just like people need to look at cardio the same way they look at weight training. And I often say this when I'm teaching, there's always at every gym I've ever been to, and I've been to gyms facilities all over the world. You go to any commercial gym, There's always three bros who have been training together for like at least 10 years. And they train like two or three hours a night because they're busy yapping to each other because they don't want to go home to their wife and kids or something. So you'll watch them. And year one, they're all benching, say, 100 kilos for a set of five. Year 10, they're still benching 100 kilos for a set of five. What happened? They never added more weight to the bar. They never did any more reps. That cardio is the same thing. And people will always joke. look at the people in January they get on the cardio machines you see them a year later they haven't lost weight yeah well that's their diet and they haven't changed because they have they've done three percent elevation at six kilometers an hour and they've never done anything more it's like there's you're so used to that you have to create a bigger stimulus that weighs more yeah I think one thing that like is so fast about fascinating about the body and I guess it's like you know body's always trying to fight your fight your efforts when it does come to training is like your body's ability to adapt you know whether that is you know the steps whether that's you doing cardio where it's you kind of lifting the huge huge loads and training your body's always like how can we find a way to make this not as stressful for next time because preserve energy preserve energy how can we preserve energy and make this way more economical and then you have to go, oh yeah, I see that and I'll, I'll raise you one and you just go harder. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's truly fascinating that the human body is a, is an amazing thing. Um, I want to wait real quick, real quick. There, there was something else I was going to say there. Um, ah, man, I think I lost it. Um, I, fuck, I lost it. Nevermind. It was good too. Um, all right. So I guess I want to kind of just go through. what would be some general training principles that the average trainee should really be paying attention to? That could be across, you know, cardio, could be across the more movement stuff, training, whatever it may be. What would be some kind of principles that you'd be using, especially when writing up somebody's training program? Yeah, so, all right. The first thing is when you're writing a training program, you have to look at things from both a balanced and imbalanced perspective. So if somebody's balanced, you can write a balanced program. If somebody's not balanced, you may need an imbalanced program to fix an imbalanced issue. So that's one of the things to be realistic with what you're trying to do. Like you said, guys, you know, international bench press and biceps day on every Monday or guys I seen guys when they start I did this when I started bench press and barbell curl like Monday Wednesday and Friday and hardly train your legs So it like you need to prioritize what needs to grow or what needs to get stronger That the first thing And then everything else comes down to exercise selection So making sure that you're pre-qualified to do a movement and you can do it. And if you're not, find a regressive, progressive model or an index. It's like we use Matt Max, one of my coaches, came up with this idea of creating all these indexes and then we've expanded them. So like, for example, if I had a brand new client, I'm probably not going to have them squat up front. I'm probably going to have them split squat first, and we're going to pre-qualify them through the split squats. And when they can do a normal split squat on the ground really well, then we're going to start thinking about moving into a squat. Or we may even think about a Bulgarian split squat first and then move them into a squat. Because to me, a Bulgarian split squat doesn't belong in the split squat index. It belongs in the single leg squat index because that's basically what it is, right? Split squat is more forward and backwards and Bulgarians more vertical. Right. So it makes sense to put it in there. So it's like. Let's see what you can do on split squat and we do it on the ground and they don't have the range of motion. OK, let's put this on a range of motion index. That's five foot elevated split squat is a regression from the split squat on the range of motion index. Right. Because it reduces the amount of range of motion you need. And it also reduces some of the loading on the front leg. So we start with front foot elevated. And when we clear that and we can get to the ground, that looks good. We might go to a slight hill elevate or slight real leg elevation. And we might go to a Bulgarian. And then cool. We've done, say, four to six months of split squats. Everything feels good. Everything looks good. Let's start squatting now. So don't think you need to jump into these big movements, because if you can't do the big movement correctly, there's always a unilateral or a machine or something else that you can use to prep you for that big movement. Now you look at like loadability indexes, the split squat, the regression of loadability is a rear foot elevated. The progression is a front foot elevated. So it's backwards because you can load a front foot elevated way more than a split squat. So you have to be very direct with your programming of what is the outcome of what we're doing? What are we trying to get out of this workout? What are we trying to get out of this week? What are we trying to get out of this training block and how does that match with the next thing we have planned and the next thing so that we get compounded interest through all of these training phases. So in a lot of cases, like I teach program design, go to the end first. What's your end goal? Because if you know your end goal, let's say it's peaking for powerlifting meet. You already know what you're going to do in that last block of training. You're going to have a deload. You're going to have a recovery. You're going to get meat prep. And now what do you need to do in the phase before that? Probably want to some maximal strength. What do you want to do in the phase before that? And you work your way back through all the strength qualities. So the thing that kills me is people going and they just wing it at the gym. Like I tell people you can exercise or you can train and they go, well, isn't training exercise? No, no exercise. You're just, you've got no plan. You have no outcome. Training is outcome based. I have a goal in mind or multiple goals, and I'm going to program and train to hit those goals. So even before you start writing a program, you have to have that insight. Like if you're going to go into the gym and spend four or five hours a week, and you're also going to tidy up your nutrition and your lifestyle, what are you trying to get out of it? Like, if you don't have a goal, why are you, why are you exercising? Like you can do any exercise after that, go run a fucking marathon, do whatever you want. Like it doesn't make any sense. If we're going to train, we're going to train, right? Yeah. Another one is don't get married. But it's like you, you, you're on a roll. On a roll. Another thing is don't get married to exercises. Like there are, there are times where there are exercises that you have to do. If it's sports, there are certain exercises you're going to have to do, especially if it's a barbell type of sport, you're in a CrossFit, you know, you're going to have barbells. If you're in a powerlifting meet, if you're in a weightlifting meet, you know, you're going to have that. It's like a high rocks. You know, you're going to have to get on the rower and you know, you're going to have to run. You know, you're going to have to do wall balls. You know, you're going to have to do farmer's carry. So you're going to have, you have to do those exercises because you don't want to try to work around those exercises and then go to a high-rex competition and find out you got a shitty grip and can't finish the farmer's walk, you know, or gas out on the wall balls. It doesn't make sense. So there is specificity. Sometimes you have to do certain exercises. Now for general health and fitness, there are no rules of that. Like if you feel more comfortable on machines and you feel a better connection to the movement and you like the external stability, cool. That's your choice. I would encourage people to try to do some three-dimensional movement because you cannot strengthen three-dimensional movement on a two-dimensional machine. So there are things you're going to get out of free weight exercises that you can't get on the machine. Just like there's stuff you can get on the machine that you can't get out of free weight exercises. If you do a back squat...

how much work is your rec fem doing? Not much. But if you do a leg extension, you're hammering the rec fem. So it's like, okay, if I want to work the rec fem, it makes sense to do knee extension. So either leg extension or I guess we used to call it natural leg extension. They call it now reverse Nordics, you know, people renaming shit. This is fine. But people get the idea, like you're going to have to focus on the extension. So be clear on what you're trying to do and what the intent of the workout is. And even with Gen Pop and general fitness stuff, their opportunities and their training menu is really broad. They could basically do anything and it's going to help them. But some things are better for certain things, like machines are better to have muscle-centric movement and to have external stability. But you don't really always want to have external stability if you're trying to use those exercises outside of the gym because you're not going to have that external stability outside of the gym. If you stumble on a set of stairs, you probably don't have anything you're going to catch yourself on. So you better be able to move in three dimension or you're going to roll your ankle. You're going to blow your knee. You're going to blow out your back. So make sure you keep some of those free weight movements in. Yeah, I think some of the most like kind of slept on exercises for like, you know, most people when they go to the gym is like, is the unilateral lower body movements. just because they are hard. They suck when you're pushing them hard. And then once you finish one leg, you're like, I have to do the fucking next one too. And as well, they can have a little bit more of a time investment because I'd be of the opinion if you're going to do one leg, then you only should have a good rest period between one leg to the next one because if you do a hard set of Bulgarians, just cardiovascularly, you're going to be fucking taxed after that. So going into the next leg, it's going to be a piss poor performance but like i i remember i was dealing with like a like some minor kind of hip and knee issues for ages from squatting and i was never ever doing any unilateral movements and i started incorporating them in and you know hips never felt better squat never looked better you know and i got as well a fuck ton fuck ton stronger too so i was able to kind of hit a number of different things there i said move better less pain stronger overall gain more muscle too um and i think as well then you know it's it can it's just another thing to gamify and i think that's something that a lot of people miss out on when it comes to training it's like they just like they can see as like or better to say exercising here they can just see it as something that they have to do like i have to do this i should go to the gym i feel bad for not going to gym and i think like a lot of us are will do better if we do try to see it as a game and a game that we can't get better at and like you know just like like if you just use the numbers in the bar i can go up to the the the 30s on my split squats for the 40s or 50s i can finish the finish the dumbbell rack and like that itself can make a little bit more pleasant to do the activity which in the moment is not too pleasant because like anything you're going to do in life is going to be like anything we're going to do in life it's It's going to be pleasant while you're doing it until you get bored. The thing is, a lot of this, it's an investment, right? So you have your, like in America, we call it a 401k. Here we have our superannuation fund. You know, if you're smart, you're putting money into those because that's your retirement. So it's like people are already focused on their financial security later. What about your health security later? Like, what are you investing into keeping yourself from aging as much as possible in trying to trying to age gracefully so you don't end up crippled when you're 70s and 80s? And I think if people thought about it like that, like, OK, so, you know, this kind of sucks now but it going to pay off with interest later And and I I not going to be short sighted I going to think long term How is this going to benefit me 10 20 30 40 even 50 years from now It like think about it like investing in stocks When you invest in stocks, would you be happy wasting money? Of course not. The whole point is you want to see your portfolio grow. But if you're just going in and you're going, oh, it's just something I have to do. Well, why wouldn't you want a good return on investment? Why would you want to lose money on that? You're losing time. And that's the most precious thing you can get. You cannot buy time. You can't get time back. So if you're going to spend the time in the gym to do it, try to get something out of it and not look at it as a chore or something else you have to do. And if people do that, they tend to fall in love with the training. And then it becomes like a fun thing for them. And they're like, whoa, I can see the results. I have proof of concept that this works. I feel great. Then they actually want to go. And then you have to kind of rein them back. You're like, I know, but you can't go eight days a week. You're fine. yeah yeah yeah i think uh there's a few different things there like uh you mentioned like invest in socks like if you think about it like the the sp500 like over time that's pretty much just went up but day to day appears where it goes down appears where it goes up but like if again if you're just to like you know make the reactive decisions based on you know you walking into the gym and you perform poorly and like or you have a just a bad day in general like fuck this i'm pulling out if you did that with stocks you know anybody didn't like stay a stay with the 10-year investment like you know be much better off in 10 years time but you could also be much worse off in 10 years time too if you just if you pull it out and i guess there with the with the kind of you know kind of playing into okay how am i feeling how's my energy today i think i think sometimes what can put a lot of people off is knowing that they're having to do this thing for 10 years or so because maybe they just haven't found their way for them to enjoy training and that that could be they've just tried powerlifting they've just tried bodybuilding they've just tried high rocks their form is out there for them they just need to sift through some more stuff um but i think trying trying to find some appreciation in doing the thing today versus like thinking too far in the future because you know even you know like if i'm prepping for a to me or you know i'm currently dieting and i'm going to be dieting until like the end of august pretty much right so i'm like if i just think about like the length of time that i have to repeat what i've done today did yesterday the day before to august it's not going to be terribly motivating because it's going to feel like that date is ages away but if i just focus on today doing the tasks i need to do today to you know move forward or and whatever that be whether it's my training nutrition or just like stuff on business side of things then that allows you just buy into the next task the next task the next task and do and do that well and you know you you kind of take that more kind of process oriented view for long enough you end up like reaching that destination like oh i've got i've got the physique i've got the girls i've got the cash it's like it's it's one of those things of like you have this you can focus on the process you You can focus on the product. And so it's a big thing to get. I like to tell people, try to get like dig into the process. Try to dig into the process. You don't want to ignore the product because that's what you're working so hard for. But if you're just focused on the product and you're not thinking about the day-to-day process and the changes you're seeing and that you're feeling each week, you're missing out because that's part of it. Like really getting into it and thinking, okay, what are the tasks I need to do? I need to tick off these boxes this week. And nutrition is, you know, you and I both know that's the hardest thing for people. Like they want to get fucking abs, but nobody they'll go train, but they won't eat the way you need to get abs. Like, do you like eating the same thing every day? Because that's the easiest way to do it. There a reason why bodybuilders the old chicken broccoli and rice like the reason bodybuilders did is because it fucking worked You know if you can get stuck into this mundane tasks and take off those boxes you going to get real fucking jacked. If you feel like you need a variety is the spice of life. It is after you get jacked. Like you have to have that. You have to change your mindset. And you're like, my wife doesn't understand. I need the same shit when I'm leaning out right now, too. I've got a physique transformation, two of them courses to teach one in the UK and one in the Netherlands in August. So I'm now I'm like, well, I can't show up not being shredded. So it's like, OK, eating the same shit every day and just taking the boxes off and just saying, all right, I'm going to show up and I'm going to have fucking veins sticking out of my eyeballs and everybody's going to go, holy shit. Yeah, this guy knows what he's talking about. Exactly. You might be a little bit brain dead while you're doing the actual seven hours. that's right i just plan that plan a refeed the week before yeah um okay it's been a it's been amazing talking and i think there's gonna be a podcast which a lot of people are gonna get a lot of use from do you have do you have any words of wisdom that you'd like to leave to listeners with before we wrap up oh the words of wisdom uh i'm i'm the last person i'm the most irresponsible person with the worst fucking life advice don't eat give some life advice but look both ways for you across the street come to my seminar in the netherlands and do mushrooms with me that sounds like a good time to be fair and so yeah you mentioned yeah so you have a uk seminar and you have a one in the netherlands when are they coming up uh the uk one is i think the second week in August that sold out in 20, a little over 24 hours. The one in, uh, Netherlands is like the last weekend of August. I think like it's all on our social media and on our website. So if anybody wants to look at that, there's, there's still some spots open in the Netherlands, but that's going to be, it's a, it's a little bit different approach on physique transformation. It's not, it's more, more about fat loss than just purely physique transformation, because we're going to go through the different phases of what somebody should be doing when they're morbidly obese for fat loss versus getting dick skin lean because people need to understand like fundamentally it's the same process but there are things you can do that speeds up the process at each three levels of like morbidly overweight average body fat and then very lean levels because physiology changes quite drastically between those so we're going to teach all of that stuff the biochemistry and the physiology behind it and then the tactics you would use with three different sets of client that you get okay okay so yeah fairly fairly comprehensive um because i guess yeah there's gonna be a lot of people who i think that there's a transformation category in a lot of like bodybuilding shows now like the like um christian guzman's like summer shredding like they have like transformation categories and they can be obviously some people's like just complete lifetime lifetime goals you know uh but they can like i've worked with if you kind of uh clients who've been like you know pretty obese and you know i've been able to get them to certain levels but you know getting them to try to whether they wanted to be or not like you know it's a different story because i have to want to get there but like um i think yeah kind of getting to that next step is definitely probably going to be a little bit more of a challenge and yeah especially with people who've been in that position you know a lot of people so like reverse when they have been that fat before you know so i guess even getting to that place is is a win well like you know you're talking about the cardio thing earlier like even even the choice of cardio you do can change drastically from being overweight to being super lean for reasons of um you know fat transport and oxidation and things like that so like if you look at somebody super Like they they not going to be able to do HIIT training and they don actually need to because the really nice thing about HIIT training is it it helps increase lipolysis helps increase the breakdown of fat from the cell. Well, really overweight people don't have that problem. They actually have a problem with oxidation, which is mitochondrial based. So they have a really easy time getting fat into the bloodstream. They have a hard time getting rid of it. When you get super lean, you have the opposite issue because you don't have a lot of fat left. So the standard list miss stuff can work, but in a lot of cases you get highly resistant to breaking down the fat. So this is where some type of mixed modality like a law McDonald's stubborn fat loss approach works really well, where you might do some hit intervals, then rest for 10 minutes and then do your steady state cardio. So that's the type of stuff we'll be teaching, but we're also, we're going to teach like the the actual biochemistry and the physiology behind of what's what's happening real and you also have um some nutritional kind of stuff i'm sorry not nutrition what are educational material to to plug as well don't you what's your business oh yeah we do we do we have a yeah program design course which we've got like 600 coaches that have done that um that's been going on for many years we're constantly upgrading it here and there we have hypertension course for reduce it reducing blood pressure and do's and don'ts for that. That's a massive, I think it's like a 15 hour course and it's really inexpensive. Uh, and it's a really important course. It's, it's, it hasn't really sold as much as our, as well as our other courses, which is frankly disappointing because coaches are commanding people's health and they're trying to, they're trying to be the captain of the ship. It's like, fuck guys, there's a lot of people out there with high blood pressure and a lot of coaches aren't even diagnosing this. They're not, they're not taking any assessments for this, which is like the easiest possible thing to do is to get a hundred dollar blood pressure cuff, take the blood pressure and then go, they've got 150 over a hundred. That might be important of how, of changing the way I'm going to program for them. Um, so that I don't make it worse. Um, we have foundations of nutrition course we've done, which is kind of like a biochemistry physiology and nutrition course for, um, understanding how we, how we make energy, how we break stuff down. And then we go in like the biochemistry of protein, carbs, and fats to kind of clear up the, a lot of the confusion over like, when is a keto diet? When may that might be a better diet or when is a, all the carb diet may be better. So we do that. And hopefully after I get done with these in-person courses, I'm going to do one on, I'm going to do secondary courses of that where I'm breaking down the macro. So I'm going to do a massive one on protein and go into like amino, specific amino acid therapy and all kinds of crazy shit and then we'll do one for fatty acid therapies and all that like it's going to get pretty nuts when i finally get down to writing those yeah there's a lot of work yeah always a lot of work not enough time all right luke uh really appreciate your time uh i will leave all of that information in the description um your instagram handle where can people find you there muscle nerds underscore education that's it if you like nasty memes you can you can do my account at luke.leeman but just don't ask me anything about health and fitness just enjoy the memes i i whenever i take a shit i post a bunch of memes and uh just enjoy it for the memes yeah i would recommend uh the meme the kids all right yeah thank you very much uh for coming on Luke I will leave everything in the description as I mentioned if you did enjoy the podcast make sure to go over to Luke's account muscle nerds education give all of them a follow if you're a coach and you want to upscale and learn more definitely take a look at some of the courses if you can afford to go to whether it's time available you're monetarily to go to any seminars do and if you did enjoy the podcast make sure to leave a rating review on the podcast platform you're listening on and I'll catch you next week