#268 Luke Leaman - Physiology, Nutrition From First Principles and Prioritising Health

# #268 Luke Leaman - Physiology, Nutrition From First Principles and Prioritising Health

**Channel:** Sigma Nutrition Radio
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sigmanutrition/Luke_Leaman.mp3?dest-id=192888

just like every exercise protocol works until it doesn't every nutritional protocol work protocol works until it doesn't so let's say okay let's say i have somebody on a modified low-carb diet so maybe they're eating you know high protein moderate fat 25 percent of their calories from carbohydrates that's going to work for a while what happens when i add three more hours of weight training a week, they're probably going to need more carbohydrates. You know, as their work volume goes up, depending on what the modality is, they're probably going to have to shift some macros. And a lot of this stuff can be, you can use metrics to see if something's working or not. Like you can look at fasting blood sugar, postprandial blood sugar. That's easy. People can do that at home. You can look at heart rate, heart variability, and blood pressure. Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. We're at episode 268 of the podcast and as ever I am your host Danny Lennon. Thank you so much for taking time to listen in to the podcast again today. And thank you to everyone who continues to show your support for the podcast by sharing it around on social media, telling friends about it, posting it in Facebook groups and especially for those of you who are supporting at the moment on Patreon as well. Thank you for all of that. It's awesome and it's the reason why the show continues to grow at the rate it's been able to which is still astounds me at times so thank you for that. Today I'm going to be talking to Luke Lehman who is while originally from Texas is currently residing in Brisbane, Australia, where I've had the chance to catch up with him over the past few weeks while I've been here. And we've had some really good conversations. And so we decided to hit record for one of them and get into some of the kind of ideas we've been talking through at various different stages. And Luke is someone with a deep fascination for nutritional biochemistry and looking at nutrient metabolism, and then trying of work from there to figure out well how should we eat or how should i program nutrition for this client how should i program their training and so luke has been running his company muscle nerds for the past number of years where they work with a variety of different clients who are aiming to maybe improve body composition or performance but kind of luke's thought process you will probably hear throughout this has been to try and focus on getting people as healthy as possible and then that putting them in a better position to achieve these goals related to body composition and performance, etc. And so we talked about a number of different things. And one of the things we've been talking about has been the importance of some base level understanding of physiology, or at least how that helps you have a better overall understanding of helping people with nutrition and training advice. And so we're going to dig into more of that in today's episode. before we get into the conversation just a couple of quick reminders first of all for those you based in australia uh then over the next couple of months i'll be doing a number of seminars so from the end of february straight through to march i'll be in gold coast sydney wallongong ballarat and perth so if you can get to any of those places you can come along the details are up on the website so just go to sigmanutrition.com slash australia or if you just navigate to the sigma nutrition website it's easy to find second for those of you who may be interested in getting access to the sigma live sessions which was a event that was run at the end of last year where i had four experts come and deep dive onto a host of different topics from uh mark mcdonald talking about fasting and autophagy to nicola guest talking about nutrition and diabetes and dietary interventions and those we had dr james morton talked about his experience in elite sport working with team sky and liverpool and then his research in the area of carbohydrate periodization and then dr kirsty elliot sale talking about her research looking at female physiology and especially aspects like relative energy efficiency in sport and the female athlete triad and considerations for coaches and practitioners so those sessions were hosted in dublin ireland and thank you to every one of you who came along to that event as i'm sure you can agree and as what being pretty much all the feedback was that it was a pretty special occasion and uh you saw just how awesome it was to be able to get these people in a room and talking through some of these issues So for those of you who were further afield from Ireland or Europe who couldn make it to that event then you can still get access now So we put up the full HD video recordings up on the website that you can go and purchase. You can go and watch them through, pause them, take notes, rewind, watch different sections. you'll get all those full session discussions as well as audience q a and then you'll be able to get mp3 audio downloads if you want to take some of those and re-listen to them on the go so that's all up on the sigma nutrition website so either just go to sigma nutrition.com or just navigate to education.sigmanutrition.com and you'll be able to get access if you so wish so without further ado let's jump into this week's discussion with mr luke lehman thank you for joining me hello it's good to be here thanks for having me come out yeah it's uh we've always had the chance to hang out last kind of few weeks a few times and a few of those conversations kind of sparked some things that i want to hopefully get into today i know we're not going to dig super deep into a whole long background for you but just to give people some context of who you are what you're doing in the health and fitness industry um and a bit about kind of muscle nerds where's the best place to start to get people up to speed uh well my basic reader's digest version is i started training when i was a little kid i competed in powerlifting and bodybuilding and strongman physique and all this stuff uh ended up working for pollock and group as a assistant coach then took over when Charles Poliquin left and then left there and started muscle nerds. And so that's what I'm doing now. And mainly we training mainly gen pop, like, there was a huge gap in people teaching people how to train gen pop, like you can find any bodybuilding seminar, you can find any powerlifting seminar, you can find out how to how do you train pro athletes, which is what I did for a long time as I taught that. And then I figured out, wow, most of the coaches coming through these programs, they don't train pro athletes, they train like Susie Muffintop from next door with three kids and a hectic lifestyle that just wants to look good on the beach and fit into a size 12 pants. And some of the protocols I was teaching people at the time was not even close to what those people needed or what they wanted, you know, what their goals were. They didn't want to be Dick Skinley. Like most of the guys that come to a personal trainer, they want that they want to feel better and look better. They want to be a little bit stronger. You know, they want to look down and see their feet, you know, that type of thing. So, um, yeah, So we've basically kind of tried to fill that little hole in the market of how do I actually train normal people and get fantastic results and, most importantly, improve their health? Because most of the industry is about improving performance. So we said, okay, if we improve people's health, their performance will automatically get better. So let's focus on that first, then move into the performance side. And that's what we've been doing the last four years. Right. And just from kind of some of the things that you're obviously interested in, it's not only training and then there's the nutrition aspect to it. Also, your interest in rehab and kind of injury prevention, I suppose, and treatment. Where do you see how you help people? Is it an integration of all of those things? Yeah, so I don't like to use the word holistic. A lot of people use holistic, and then you get this weird, like, granola, hippie, crunchy, like, kind of hemp thing going on. But the wave of the future is going to be integrative personal training. And it's going to be in the past, it was personal trainers trying to do rehab, trying to do, you know, trying to look at people's labs and trying to do this, trying to play doctor. And while that's, it's good to know a little bit about that stuff. We all have to stay in scope of practice. So it's important for me to teach people how to speak the same languages so that you can refer out and talk to doctors the right way. Talk to nutritionists the right way. Everybody needs to stay in their lane and do what they're really good at. So for the personal training industry, like I love nutrition. That's one of my favorite things in nutritional biochemistry. And there's a lot of coaches that like to write nutrition that they shouldn't because they just don't understand the dynamics. Just like you wouldn't go to a dietician and have them write your training program. It would be shit, and it might even be detrimental. So I think that teaching people a broad concept of how all these modalities work together and knowing enough of the language to talk to each other. And, you know, maybe you learn enough and get the credentials to do some of that yourself. Like maybe you go do your CISSN. Maybe you do your GDEP. Maybe you get your master's. Maybe you do something so you have that side of it. but the main thing is how do we all work together instead of all bashing each other's modalities that way we can do what's best for our clients right one thing that kind of stuck with me the other day when we were talking is essentially the idea that you hate this kind of binary thinking that a lot of people have and how almost everything whether it from your training philosophy down to things to do with nutrition can be at least like this sliding scale and this kind of spectrum of different ideas um can you maybe touch on that and a bit about what realizations made you decide okay hey everything is on this kind of spectrum it's not this binary thinking yeah like everyone has a dogmatic approach to what they do and they think that their thing is the right thing to do and you see this a lot in like the physique world okay so i did a contest and this type of dieting worked for me and this type of training worked for me and I did no cardio and I did this and these supplements worked. And then you try to fit all of these people who are round pegs. You try to shove them in a square hole and it works for some people, it doesn't work for everybody. So, I mean, I grew up in a system that was fairly dogmatic. Like everything was low carb, everything was no cardio, aerobics makes you fat and all this. And I kind of came to the realization when I was 35 and I went to the doctor, I just didn't feel right. You know, I was like crying after sex, wanting to cuddle and didn't want to watch football anymore. And that type of thing. And I was like, what is wrong with me? I think I have low testosterone. So I went to the doctor and sure as shit, I had low testosterone, high estradiol. So no wonder I was being so emotional and that type of thing. But then I also, holy shit, I had stage two hypertension and my triglycerides were 399 and they should be below 99. And my LDL was high, my HDL was low. And I was having all these metabolic syndrome things. And I said, man, how, this doesn't make sense because I'm big and I'm ripped and I'm strong and I'm fast and all this stuff. But then I realized, man, I'm just focusing on the performance and everything I do is so performance orientated that it's swinging me too far towards one side of the pendulum and I need to swing back. And the only way you can do that is if you think about the body on a sliding scale, there's nothing black and white about the body. So what I was doing is I was taking an allopathic model of medicine and trying to fit it in with my personal training. So I said, okay, I can't do aerobics, going to be fat and weak. Okay, cool. So then I lost my cardiac output. I lost my ability to transfer oxygen. I've lost my ability to process carbohydrates effectively and eat the most amount of calories. And that was impairing my performance. And then when things, when you do that and you have a mismatch of certain macros and certain calories, you're not making energy effectively. Certain things have to shut down in order to parlay that energy into what's most important, which is survival. So I had a couple of years where I was mentored by James LaValle and he changed my thought process on this and says, you know, stop being so one dimensional. You know, the body's a three-dimensional space, and you have to accommodate for that. So you can't just do – you can't pay Peter to rob Paul unless you pay Paul first. So I started getting into the concept of, you know, how would I train a pro athlete that was when everything was on the line, right? And I started thinking about, wow, everything I'm doing is like specific physical preparedness, but I'm not doing any general prep. And I find that that's pretty much the scenario for most trainers. You come in, you say, okay, what are your three goals? I want to put 10 kilos of lean body mass on. I want to put 25 kilos on my deadlift, and I want to put two inches on my vertical. Cool, we're going to take care of all that. But then we're not also at the same time measuring what's their blood pressure, what's their waking heart rate, what's their HRV. Are they sleeping? They're not sleeping. Well, they're not recovering. Okay, maybe we need to also think about the general physical preparedness model in general population as well. And when you talk to low-level trainers who don't know periodization, they don't understand what GPP and SPP means. So what we talk about is instead of GPP, GPP is what you need. SPP is what you want. So Joe Dingleberry comes in and he wants all these things, and I take his biometrics, and I find, man, he's not in a really good physical shape. I'll give you what you want, but you've got to give me what you need first because the healthier you are, the performance will come almost effortlessly. So it's essentially been able to raise their potential ceiling once you do kick into the other work, that the greater their gpp base that they're having yeah and it's people are coming to us and they're not you know they want us to optimize a system that's broken so okay so you just flew down from brisbane to melbourne right you got on the plane what if you wanted to take a road trip instead and you went and you bought a used car and the car had four flats a crack in the windshield it wasn't car worthy it had an oil link the engine light was on would you just get in the car and start driving? Absolutely not. You know, you would go in, you have to get the rego and you have to get inspected and you have to get a new windshield and you have to get new tires and you have to fix the everything. But what people end up doing is they just start chasing their goals while their check engine light is on and they just ignore the check engine light. Oh, that'll get better if I just get in better shape, but they're not doing things, get in better shape. They're doing things to look physically better while the internal components aren't very good. They're basically, okay, I'm going to take this car and I'm going to give it a paint job and fuck the engine. Right yeah What does that conversation look like with a client Because essentially what you trying to do there is get them to almost hit the pause button on some of these maybe lofty goals they may have and especially if they very performance orientated and they want something in a certain period of time And almost okay let pull back on this so we can work on this other stuff that can probably be a difficult sell for some people so maybe just for even coaches listening pragmatically how does that conversation often play out with you how do you frame it for someone that might need that well the first thing is just being completely honest right being honest with the client look this is this is where you are physically right now and this is where you want to be, but I can't take you to that level without harming something else until we get everything right. So knowledge is power. First and foremost, you need to understand basic biochemistry, basic exercise metabolism, right? So there's a need to go out and get that education because you're not going to get that education in like a cert three, cert four or weekend course, you know, you're going to learn enough to pass the test. And most trainers just want to get their license to go train people. And they have no idea what they're doing. Even guys that have an exercise phys degree, Like they've done all of this cool theory, but then they leave and they don't know how to apply it, especially to gen pop. Because everybody does an exercise phys degree because they want to go train athletes. Then they realize athletes are broke. So then they're like, fuck, I can't actually make a living and have kids and a nice car and a house doing this. So where's the money? It's in general population. Those are the people that need it the most, the people who aren't genetically gifted, who aren't athletes, who have a lifestyle that's contributed to them being, have a completely dysfunctional body, metabolism, structure, function, and all that. So understanding like, okay, what happens when I actually eat food? How does it get broken down? How do I assimilate it? How does it get into the cell? How does it get in the mitochondria? What happens after that? How do we recycle energy? You need to know this stuff, not to be a biochemist, but to know it at a functional enough level to understand how to pick the right type of diet and the right type of calories and things. And then on the training side, how do I pick the right modality? I've got 300 templates I can use when I train somebody. I have 50 different conditioning protocols. How do I know which one of those to pick, and how do I know how to put those together with the nutrition in a long-term periodized scheme to get somebody from A to B? And most trainers don't do enough continuing education, or they're busy learning advanced hypertrophy techniques, advanced fat loss techniques, when they don't even know the fundamentals of any of this stuff. so in every country is a little bit different i think australia and london are the two areas i've seen where the trainers actually take it the most serious and it's you know it's not any surprise that they're the ones making the most money and they can charge the most price and they're getting the best results when i look at the guys in canada and the u.s they're too busy taking fucking bosu ball and trx certifications they don't want to know that they don't want to learn a science that for whatever reason they have an aversion to learning if i do gvt's 10 sets of 10 versus reg part five by five, what are the different adaptations? Cause they're vastly different and you want to use them at different times. So for instance, when you're talking to a client, if I have a client that comes in and his blood pressure is 140 over 90, okay. The last thing I'm going to do is put them under heavy load because that's going to make his blood pressure keep going up. It's going to cause cardiac adaptations that are going to increase his blood pressure. And you're going to increase his predisposition to having some type of cardiac episode at some point. it's not that you they can't train you just have to change the emphasis so if i look at this spectrum of being on the far left is more metabolic anaerobic work and on the far right is alactic or anaerobic and neural work if somebody comes in and they already have high uh resting or high uh waking heart rate a horrible hrv which is a really good measure for stress and parasympathetic to sympathetic tone and if they have really high blood pressure the last thing they need to do is come in and beast themselves with a lot of neural work, right? So what we do is they still train hard. We just change the emphasis, do more metabolic work, right? So maybe we do, maybe this is a great phase for them to do higher reps, learning how to do the movements with submaximal weight, because in order to build strength, you have to understand that strength is a skill and you have to build skill and technique and an exercise, then load it. And that you do this over time. If they understand that by getting them healthy, they're going to get better results. They're going to get stronger, bigger, faster, get leaner, faster. They're going to sleep better. they're going to have better digestion, better assimilation, like their whole life is going to improve. If you have the base knowledge to explain that to them in a very simple way, then they see what the payout is, and then they're more likely to do it. And it doesn't take long. Our usual least mode phase that we do with people is maybe six to eight weeks. And if we can't fix your stuff with that, if you're still fucked up after that, then it's probably out of my wheelhouse, and I need to send you out for labs and see what's actually really going on. Because if I haven't fixed it by then, it's probably not something I'm going to fix with diet and exercise alone. Sure. We'll definitely dig into that. But the previous point you made, there's kind of two aspects to that when it comes to trainers trying to learn more and take more information in. One on the kind of most basic side is, like you said, the principles versus methods being knowing how to use these different methods comes from an understanding of certain principles. And some degree of education is helpful there. I think the vast majority of people that typically

listen to this podcast are probably good on that front in terms of trying to learn more but there's kind of a second kind of nuance that which we kind of talked about at dinner the other night of there's a kind of distinct difference in just following what conclusions from research papers are which can be very good and very helpful but if that is in the complete absence of any understanding of physiology or biochemistry like you mentioned you don't have that ability to think of things from first principles, I guess. And a lot of these questions that we might try to answer of how someone should eat or what happens when they eat a certain way can be answered just through that kind of first principles thinking, right? Instead of thinking, oh, I need to read every single meta-analysis on everything. I need to know all this stuff and have, how can I keep up to date with all this research? You can get a fair chunk of the way if you understand physiology that you may see in a textbook, right? Yeah. Look, just understanding first semester biochemistry will get you really far, like really far. And that's the thing with the conversation we had the other night is research is really important, but research can be very limited as well. And it's also up to the interpretation of the person reading the science. It's also, is the research any good? Did you actually read the research paper? Are you qualified to read research? So for a lot of coaches that aren't qualified to read research, they have no idea about any of that so i'm i'm one of those like i read a lot of research reviews and then i weigh my knowledge of biochemistry and physiology against what that author concluded because what i find too is a lot of the people that are doing the research reviews they're very good at reading research but their their actual cellular knowledge is not that good so then they put out a review and i look at it and i go okay i can kind of see where he inferred that or she inferred that now let me look back at how the body actually works that doesn't really make a lot of sense But if you don't actually know the underlying principles of how the body works, you don't know to discern whether somebody is full of shit or not. And then you're watching all of these talking heads that all have their own research. They're all arguing, oh, your study shit because of this. Well, no, let me explain why it's not shit. And then who the hell are you supposed to follow? And I guess this even comes more apparent when you look at, say, anyone picks a certain type of dietary approach that they're trying to promote. And you're again, you're trying to work out, is this bullshit or not? for a lot of this stuff there isn't going to be a research paper specifically on this right or there's going to be these gray areas where someone will say well there's no research done on this so there's kind of like a checklist that you can do to see well is there any sort of biological mechanism is it plausible even that it could possibly happen and if you can rule that out then you don't need to go any further right if it's biologically impossible you don't need to look for any other review papers 100 and when you look at the research they're very it's very one-dimensional there's you can only control a certain number of variables per per experiment so when you look at somebody who's okay we're considering the type of conditioning they're doing the training age male versus female the genetic background we look at the nutrition we look at there's a lot of stuff we're looking at you're not going to find a large scale study that puts in every single variable it would be ungodly expensive and who would you get to run it and fund it and all this stuff so you look at you look at bits and pieces try to infer how they're going to fit together, then you try stuff in the field. Did it work? Did it not? Did it work for everybody? Where do you find that it's not working? Now let's look back at the chemistry. Why is it not working? Oh, I forgot about this thing right here. So there's just so many things that you have to put in. So you have to have, you know, if you look at true evidence-based research, you're looking at, or practice, you're looking at the research and then you're experimenting and you're drawing your conclusions on what's going on, right? Yeah. I saw this quite kind of vividly recently. I was talking to dr james morton who has been head of nutrition at team sky he's oversaw i think five of their tour de france titles and uh one of the big thing he impresses so he's an like a professor in exercise metabolism obviously super in tune with biochemistry but on a practical side he's like a lot of the stuff we would see in research or typical parameters we would have for say cycling and nutrition for sports just he found just didn't apply to some of these top guys in the world like they were physically capable of doing things that shouldn't happen right so then to try and fathom well how is this happening why is one rider able to go for six hours on zero carbohydrate and be perfectly fine another need to have a high carbohydrate feeding an hour and a half into that cycle like these are differences they're seeing in these guys it's like well to understand that you can't go and look at references from particular research or even to some degree some of the textbook parameters you would see. Instead, he had to think, well, what's going on? And then you would come back to biochemically what's going on and then try and piece it apart and trial and error and all this other type of stuff we've just discussed. And so this is how people are navigating elite level of sports. So this is not kind of in any way theoretical right Yeah Yeah you know one time Dr Bob Rakowski said something to me that I thought was brilliant he goes you an n of one he goes you look at the research you try it it may work for you may not what if you outside of the deviation you know you if you look at a bell curve it might help 70 of the people and 15 it does nothing for 15 it's horrendous for so the only way we know is by understanding the base level foundational information how the body works then let's look at the research let's try it why do i feel like it didn't work is there something i could have done better. And then a lot of the traps that trainers, young trainers will get into is they love reading abstracts and they infer their information from an abstract and they go, look, this says this, but you didn't actually pull the 50 page research paper off and read through the whole thing. I saw one the other day on beta alanine and beta alanine doesn't work unless you load it for three or four weeks. And the study was they took beta alanine, then they cycled, does nothing. So you read the abstract and you go, see, I told you beta alanine didn't do anything. Well, no shit, because you got to load it over time, right? Or, you know, if you look at some of the research, was the protocol even done well? There was a modified GVT out, and they said, well, GVT is no better than our standard programming. When I pulled the paper, it wasn't the parameters of GVT. Like, the loading parameters were wrong. It wasn't done long enough. The exercise selection was wrong. There's no way we would ever write a protocol like that. so are we actually researching what we're looking for so if you're not actually researching what it says then you can't tell if what you actually do when you do the real protocol is you are you going to get the same results no absolutely not yeah and that's the whole thing like research is super important can inform a lot of our decisions but just bearing in mind essentially what it's doing there it's framing for most people this is probably the best starting point or this is the closest to the bullseye we can get but from there you may need to change a whole host of things or maybe nothing so with diet you could you could say for any one person a certain type of diet could be a terrible idea or a good thing right even down to fiber intakes in certain cases you may have someone that needs to go on a low fiber diet for a while you may need someone who just isn't going to do well on grains but in general you can still make the case that higher fiber diets and whole grains are probably decent for human health, right? But it's not the same thing as saying you as an individual need to eat these things. And I think that gets lost sometimes in the noise. Yeah. And what people need to realize is every, it just like every exercise protocol works until it doesn't, every nutritional protocol works until it doesn't. So let's say, okay, let's say I have somebody on a modified low carb diet. So maybe they're eating, you know, high protein, moderate fat, 25% of their calories from carbohydrates. That's going to work for a while. What happens when I add three more hours of weight training a week, they're probably going to need more carbohydrates, you know, as their work volume goes up, depending on what the modality is, they're probably going to have to shift some macros. And a lot of this stuff can be, you can use metrics to see if something's working or not. Like you can look at, you know, fasting blood sugar, postprandial blood sugar. That's easy. People can do that at home. You can look at heart rate, heart variability, and blood pressure, right? If I put somebody on a hypercaloric diet with a lot of carbs because they want to grow. Cool. How do I know when to stop that? Well, if your blood pressure starts to go up, if you start putting on more fat than muscle, if you start holding on the water, if your waking heart rate goes up and you're fasting in postprandial blood sugar, it's all wacky. You've probably maximized the hypertrophic response of that unless your response is to get fat and to get metabolic syndrome. So now maybe it's time for a mini cut, but this stuff is all quantifiable and you can do this at home easily with just hardly any tech at all. I mean, what a time to be alive when you can get tons of metrics at home, and you can even, in most countries, order labs off the internet, as long as you know how to read them. It's interesting, and I think we had kind of touched on the other night about low-carbohydrate diets and similar anecdotal experiences of working with people who had been on a low-carbohydrate diet, and it worked excellently for a number of months, maybe longer. And at a certain point, When things start to change and different variables by increasing their carbohydrate content in the diet, they then see better results. And that kind of is just one of those examples that you talk about of over time as variables change, whether that's their training workload, whether that's actually just their biomarkers, their overall health, the requirements for that change. And that kind of nicely filters back to our discussion of like, once you understand from first principles what's going on, then you can make those changes instead of thinking, well, which diet is best? And, oh, this type of person goes on this type of diet and that's it. Or this is the one type of dieting strategy. Instead, now it's much more fluid and dynamic over time. And so for even one individual, there's no one best diet. It's just what's the best diet for this particular moment or this particular phase going forward. Yeah and I think it important too to understand when you say low diet what are we even meaning Because depending on your perspective that could be a few different things Some people it could be ketogenic diet standard ketogenic Some could be cyclical. Some people could be, oh, I'm going to do a negative carbohydrate diet, just eat all celery. And in most of the research, at least up to the last 10 years, most of the research, low-carb dieting was 30% or 40% carbohydrate diet. That doesn't sound like low-carb for most people, but when you appeal to extremes in any study, when you look at the, when you look at the evidence, if you go extremely low fat or extremely low carb, people tend to gravitate back towards 30 to 40% naturally, right? Most of the people, you know, I personally think for most gen pop, a low carbohydrate diet is probably best for them. They just don't have the output to need a lot of carbohydrates, but what's low for them. If I have a guy that comes in and he's six foot tall and he's fricking 130 pounds, what's low carb for him, right the low carb for him might be 60 carbohydrates so maybe that's where i start him and maybe high carb for him is freaking nine i've had guys on 90 carbohydrates this is the only way i could keep weight on them right you know it's it's crazy and uh i remember a few years ago i wrote a post essentially along those lines i think it was something like is low carbohydrate dieting effective my low carb isn't your low carb or something like that was kind of a sub headline in there and it was essentially the idea of that when we asked that question is a low carb diet effective for weight loss first what do we mean by low carbohydrate like that's just an arbitrary label that we're putting on it and then secondly what do we mean by effective because that could be a number of things whether that's compared to like isocaloric diets or in practice just telling someone to eat low carb so i think the idea of yeah low carbohydrate diets can be all over the place particularly like you say when you look at research like it can go all the way from ketogenic diet up to 40 or less depending on the study and we're still using that term low carbohydrate yeah and it's low it should be low carb not no carb right and because it's impossible to eat no carb and it's you just there's nothing you can do in this world where you're going to eat no carb right but like for me i my low carb it seems to be around like 80 to 120 grams of carbs like i've i've got guys that their low carb is 700 grams of carbs a day and their high carbs like 12 to 1500. You know, my high carb is like three to 400. That's just what I feel best, you know, and, you know, one of the one of the new theories that I think is probably the most plausible of why people get insulin resistant, it's a protection measurement for the body. And so if we look at the mitochondria, and we look at energy production, where do you make the majority of your free radicals of complex one and three in the electron transport chain. so if i'm really stressed out stress inherently makes your body want to break down and utilize more energy right so if i start shoveling a lot of a lot of glucose which is a really good that's your preferred energy source and states of stress and sympathetic drive and i'm shoveling all of this into my mitochondria i can only make so much atp and then i can make heat but then it's also dependent on cofactors and enzymes and i can only make those so quickly and if i'm not taking like a good multivitamin, if I'm not eating a lot of phytonutrients, a lot of plant matter, if I'm running out of those things, the body can't use some of these things and they can't just stick around. They have to be turned into something else. So then the body says, okay, I have, I've got all of this oxidation going on. I can't reduce any of this stuff because people are really anti-antioxidants because they think it's going to kill their muscle gains, which is ridiculous. And, um, so they're eating all this food. They're trying to make all this energy. They're also stressed out because they're beasting their life. Now their redox is off. So the mitochondria goes, okay, what's the easiest way to stop this? Okay. I'll just make, I'll just become resistant to pyruvate. So then I'll just kick pyruvate out as lactate. We'll just make that back into glucose and we'll just keep getting recycled over here. Right. Then eventually the mitochondria won't allow you to put fatty acids in. Right. So at the end of the day, what, what is the, what is the chemical we run on? If you bottleneck it into one thing, when you break amino acids down, glucose down, fat down, there's one thing that's entering the mitochondria and and in Krebs cycle. Acetyl-CoA. If I get to a point where I can't get that in the mitochondria efficiently because the mitochondria is shutting itself down, now that has to be recycled into something else. So in the case of glucose, yeah, we can make more glycogen, but if you're stressed out, glycogen synthase goes down, glycolysis goes up. So now you can't store glycogen effectively. So that gets kicked out of something else. What does fat get kicked out as? Well, it can get kicked out as cholesterol. And if you can't get that cholesterol back in the mitochondria, you can't make male and female sex hormones. So now you've got low testosterone, you've got low progesterone, you've got all these other hormonal issues. And then people focus on the hormonal stuff instead of working on what's really the problem, which is your mitochondria is probably a bit dysfunctional. Then you get steatosis, you get elevation of ceramides, ATP goes up, AMP goes down, AMPK goes down. So now you don't even have the metabolic switch to keep recycling. So it's just a big clusterfuck of things that happen. So then the, your body says, okay well I just I just limit the amount of glucose getting into the cell I become insulin resistant and glucose So now your blood sugar rises Now your cholesterol rises LDL goes up HDL goes down Your triglycerides go down Now you go to the doctor, and he wants to put you on a statin. He wants to put you on metformin or any of the other medications for this, and then your blood pressure goes up. It's just a clusterfuck. If we just focused on what was important, which maybe we cut down the glucose for a limited amount of time, increase your activity, you know especially things that will will harness mitochondrial growth and efficiency like increasing aerobic activity and getting in better shape limiting neural loading limiting things that are going to kick in the sympathetic system people tend to get better a lot faster and just do that for a short amount of time and you can go back to beasting yourself sorry i just went all off so just to kind of recap some of that for people when we have these substrates and we're just trying to jam too much into the cell too much into the mitochondria to try and oxidize we've all this substrate coming in and essentially as a an adaptation to defend from that because we can't keep doing that the cell can become instant resistant once it's instant resistant to stop some of this energy overload now we're going to obviously see the increase in blood glucose because we're nowhere to shove it unless we have this kind of secondary adaptive response of just creating new fat cells and trying to store more of this energy to as essentially the lesser of two evils to continued high blood glucose, right? So it's just, like you say, a big clusterfuck of shit going on. It's a big clusterfuck. It's just a shitstorm. And, you know, when you look at, like, from an allopathic medicine viewpoint, they're going to go, okay, all right, let's put you on statins to control the cholesterol. Let's put you on something like metformin to control the blood sugar. Well, now you're forcing the cell to take energy it doesn't want. You're going to have something else break somewhere down the line, right? You're robbing Peter to pay Paul. I think a better thing to do is to work on increasing the biochemical pathways that will help you to create more mitochondria, right? Like a stimulating PPAR and PGC1-alpha. That's easy to do by getting into caloric deficit, which is the foundation of all nutrition is caloric deficit, and then also increasing your activity. But it needs to be the right activity that then harnesses these chemical pathways that then tells your body to make more mitochondria. And one of those stimuluses is free radicals. You increase free radicals, you make more mitochondria, but the problem is you still have to neutralize those free radicals or you then have another bottleneck. And from a bodybuilder bro perspective, if you want to control blood sugar, what are you going to do? I'm going to give somebody a GDA. So maybe I give them metformin or berberine, all this stuff that's going to force the cell. From allopathic medicine, it's one of the anti-diabetic drugs. But what we're doing is we're treating the effect and not the cause. And the cause for most people is they live in a state of constant chronic stress that they just need to learn how to manage better, get rid of what you can, manage the rest of it, and then don't use your training as another inducer of chronic stress. Don't use your nutrition as an inducer of chronic stress. So in order to find if you're not making energy effectively, if you're in a stressed out state, what do people do? Let's train more and let's eat less. but at some point you can't just keep eating less then you get a chronic mismatch of calories and activity things have to shut down so your body's metabolism will get and i hate this word more efficient because i don't feel like this is efficiency at all it's becoming efficient to the point where it can utilize less calories to stay alive but now you're losing optimization of your physiology for me efficiency is make the mitochondria work as well as they can try to increase it as much as you can get in better shape then guess what you can start cranking your calories up because you can maintain your your chemistry right so on the nutrition side like you mentioned the caloric deficit as a kind of side tangent to that be interested to ask your thoughts here with fasting just because of how big a thing it is right now but in particular some of those benefits for the same reason tend to get talked about of that we can see some of pronounce changes when we have some metabolic dysregulation. A lot of people will talk about impacts in the cell, particularly the mitochondria as well. From what you have concluded on and what you've seen, do you think that that is driven by fasting being used to just restrict overall energy and calories? Or do you think there's something else going on that would make that have an added benefit for some of these changes in that case? Yeah, I think it's multifactorial, right? So when we look at when we look at anything with mitochondria cells or whatever you have the building of things you have to break down the things you've got metophagy autophagy and then you also have building that stuff back up so fasting for some people can be a good way to remove some of that dysfunctional mitochondria to make way for new mitochondria but people need to get people at all they they love fads and they love getting on the bandwags and things like that if you want to utilize you know a couple of days of time domain eating maybe you do like what they're calling intermittent fasting, which is, you know, you're doing like a 16, eight or something like that, that can be very valuable for me.

That's more of a, let's just create a massive caloric deficit. So if I have a client that's like, I hate dieting. Okay. Can you go, can you skip meals without getting hypoglycemic and lightheaded? Yeah. Without getting too irritated and angry. Yeah. Okay, cool. So what we're going to do is we're going to feed you enough calories on the days you train. And then we might do a couple of days of, you know, not eating for 16 hours and then try to make up your calories in eight hours. I think that can be useful for a lot of people. I don't think you're going to get the benefits of true fasting from that. So like doing a one to three day fast, but you can't do a one to three day fast and then go to the gym and kill yourself. Like, like if we look at the kind of our idea of beast mode versus least mode, if you're going to fast, cool, you should be doing everything. Cause that's going to be highly sympathetic in nature. Anyways, what you should be doing is doing as much as you can on those days to drive your parasympathetic tone back up. All right. So my buddy, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, talks about it as the autonomic nervous system as sympathetic being the gas pedal and then parasympathetic being the brake pedal. So they don't work on a seesaw, right? You can start reducing some training to take your foot off the gas pedal, but if you're going 200 miles an hour, you still need to pump the brakes a little bit. So it's doing all the things that meatheads typically don't want to do. Like, why don't you go to a float tank? Why don't you journal, meditate? Go take a fucking yoga class. You know, do some of the go take a long walks on the beach, candlelight dinners, whatever you need to do, go get a rub and tug, whatever you need to do to get your body to calm down. Because people love to put things out. They don't like to put things in. So that's one of those missing pieces. If we're going to talk about training really hard, you also have to recover really hard, which means you've got to focus on getting more sleep, maybe some introspection, maybe learn how to do guided meditation, you know, doing stuff to calm down. because in my experience over the last 20 years, that's the hard thing to get people to do. They don't mind coming in four hours a day and just getting completely demolished. But if you tell them to go get a massage or like go to a float tank, I don't have time for that because it's not that they don't have time. They don't want to make time for it. You know, you can't just keep outputting without putting the oil back in. In some of those examples we talked about from a training perspective, obviously one aspect of that you said was for some people they may need to pull back and not go and beat themselves in the gym. But beyond that, is that a particular time point where you think the inclusion of more aerobic-based work can be useful for those types of people, particularly if we're looking at trying to generate more mitochondria, for example, with certain training modalities? And if so, how does that kind of play out typically with how you program? Yeah, so when people come to us, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to try to definitely get a blood pressure. And I find that most of the training industry will not take blood pressure. And I don't know if they feel like, oh, I've never been trained to do this or it's not. You don't need to pull out a stethoscope and all this shit. You just you go to the chemist and you buy a really good like I use an Omron BP 7000 Evolve. It's a blood cuff. You put it on, you hit the button. It can't get any easier than that. And you can get a baseline blood pressure. So his blood pressure is really high. The last thing I want to do is beat him down. I want to get that. I want to get that back down. Right. If they're resting, heart rate's really high. I got to get that down. The easiest, fastest way to do that is through metabolic conditioning. whether you know no one likes the to hear the word steady state aerobics for me that's the easiest fastest way to do it it just the only problem is because the intensity is so low the volume has to be very high and it needs to be done daily because mitochondria turn over really fast so whether it's 30 minutes a day or you know i'll have some people do 90 minutes a day of aerobic activity and they go oh but it's gonna make me fat and weak and blah blah it doesn't because it's so low, you don't have to do any real recovery for that. That is your recovery. And then from the training side, okay, cool. I see you've been doing three to one wave loading and you've been doing like fucking 30 second hit intervals on the air dime, right? Okay. So how about we try this? Like you look great. You feel like shit. Maybe we, you know, what's the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results. How's that training been affecting you? How's that working for you? And they go, oh, and then you usually get a light bulb moment. We're like, shit, maybe that is a problem. I'll tell you what, give me the next three weeks. We're going to do a little bit of aerobic output. So whether that's steady state aerobics or whether we do aerobic style intervals, you know, that type of thing. Um, and then instead of doing like the heavy neural load loading, let's do some submaximal bodybuilding type, or just get in there and pump it up and feel good. Right. Pump the muscles up, look in the mirror, look at your biceps, command them to grow or whatever you want to do. Right. Um, maybe that's drone to eight by eight, maybe that, but GVT stuff that's submaximal that doesn't drive that doesn't drive a neural response, which is directly going to increase your sympathetic drive. Right. And we do that for three weeks. And then they come back and they go, Oh shit, my blood pressure's dropped 15 points. And my, my I'm waking up and I'm at 65, not 85 beats per minute. My HRV is starting to go up. How do you feel? Great. How do you sleep? Oh my God, I sleeping like two more hours a night And I actually took a solid shit for the first time in three years Excellent You ready to do another like maybe three four or five weeks of that And then we go into then I just bash you into the ground Then they got the buy because they seen the results Three weeks is not a lot of time. They get massive results in three to four weeks. Cool. Then they, then you build that trust. Then we go through phases of beasting them out and then doing a lease mode, beast them out in lease mode. So once you get the metric stable, like we talked about early, you got to find that like, where are they at homeostasis and that homeostasis needs to be at a level where they feel awesome and they're performing well. How now, how do we optimize that? And now how do we use that to plan when they need to deload? And for me, deloading is moving into a lease mode day or lease mode week or lease mode phase, or switching from heavy lifting back to metabolic work. So for instance, like let's say I'm training you and you come in and you've got stage two hypertension and 95 beats per minute when you wake up HRV of 48. Okay. we've got to fix this. So we do four weeks. Now your blood pressure is down to like one 30 over 80. Cool. Stage one hypertension, but it's getting better. Your heart rate might've dropped to like 73. Good. We're moving the right direction. We just keep on this. Now we've got you down to where maybe your waking heart rate is 55. That's excellent. Your blood pressure is one 17 over 67. That's picture perfect. Maybe your HRV sitting at 65. That, how do you feel? Great. How's your poop? Awesome. How's your food? I'm getting really hungry. Okay. I'm eating more and I'm not gaining any weight. Awesome. So let's do this. Let's now crush you. And when those metrics trend the wrong direction for more than five or six days, then we're going to deload. And instead of cutting training volume, I'm just going to switch the emphasis back to submaximal lifting something, you know, in the 60 to maybe 75%, one rep max range. And maybe we taper off some of the conditioning instead of doing like hit intervals. Maybe we go back to aerobic intervals, something like that. A week later, your metrics look good again. You come back, you're stronger, you're leaner, you're bigger. Awesome. Now let's crush you again. So just to touch on some of those metrics that you've mentioned, maybe for people listening from a starting point, what ones do you think are easy, kind of non-invasive that pretty much anyone can be collecting that is going to give them useful information? And then maybe beyond that, what are some extra things that they should consider if they want to go a bit beyond and track some of the things that you might track with clients? Okay. Probably the easiest and most accessible for most people. If you're, if you're, if you have the money to train with somebody, you probably have a smartphone, right? I know people who are homeless with smartphones, right? So you can use there's, you can use the Argus app to take your heart rate. You can use a iFleet. You can use HRV for training. There's a ton of different ones you can use where you just put your finger against the camera and it'll give you an HRV and it'll give you your heart rate. So that's the easiest. If, if the client's coming to me from a doctor and they've got high blood pressure, I'm probably going to tell them to buy a blood pressure cuff, you know, but not everybody's going to spend seven or 80 bucks for that. So if not, I'd send them to the grocery store to one of those machines. And I haven't taken thing there for free or whatever, just so we have a baseline. If they don't get it fine. Um, but if I can get heart rate and HRV, that's going to give me a lot of data, right? Um, some of the extra stuff, a glucometer, I try to get everybody to get a glucometer just so they start understanding fasting blood sugar and postprandial. So we'll have them take their blood sugar right when they wake up for a few mornings, like four or five mornings. So what's the trend? Okay, let's modify your diet. Let's do the diet for three weeks and let's take it again for three or four days and let's see how that diet's affected you. Um, if they're doing a ketogenic diet, which I, I start a lot of people off with very low carb diets for three weeks and then I start ramping the carbs up to their tolerance. So we can do that with a ketometer, freestyle Libra, freestyle Optium. We'll do that. If the client really wants to be analytical, we get them a continuous blood glucose device. So the Freestyle Libre, they put an implant in the back of their arm. I've had very few people that are willing to do that. I think it should be mandatory for all trainers to do that for three or four months. So they understand that'll give them a deeper understanding of how food affects them. And then that they can use that knowledge to then look at their clients and say, how do I feel like this is going to affect them based on the data I used with myself, right? What else do we use? Yeah, other than that, like standard strength stuff, we use modified Cooper's test a lot to see where they are on the aerobic and aerobic spectrum. And then we can modify that through their training. So if they're gen pop, gen poppers is never going to be too aerobic, right? I mean, the aerobic, as my wife would say, is the pathway for life. It's what keeps you alive. If somebody wants to get super aerobically fit, I don't have a problem with that. Now, if it's a power lifter, I got a problem with it. It's an Olympic weight lifter. I got a problem with it, right? If it's a bodybuilder or a fighter, I've got a problem with it because there's certain places we want them. If it's a fighter, we want them to have power endurance. It doesn't, doesn't make any sense if you're, you can last five rounds, but you hit like a five-year-old, right? Um, unless your jujitsu is really good. And that's a whole nother story, but you know, you you get you without getting this data you cannot make a proper program without this You can make a program that probably work for most people but what about when it doesn work And is it working the best for your client Personal trainers get paid a lot of money And so professional personal training you should take it professionally, which means that I should be doing everything I can to get my client the best possible results and drive them to the best possible health they can be. Yeah. I liked that you mentioned a few moments ago that you look to see if they're a downward trend in some of these markers after like say five or six continuous days because i think the big issue a lot of time when people try and start to include more data to make decisions is they jump too early at the first sign of something flickering like one day something their hrv is lower or their resting heart rate goes up after one day or they had a poor workout and that one workout means oh i need a deload and then they deload for a week based off the back of that and make snap decisions too early. So is that that decision to wait that certain number of days? Is that a function of the fluctuations you see in some of these numbers? Yeah, I mean, they can fluctuate a lot. But also, it's how do I know when I'm overreaching? Like the whole purpose of getting stronger and getting bigger is you have to go into an overreaching phase, right? So you expect to get weaker, you expect for your heart rate to go up, you expect for blood pressure, you expect these numbers to change, that's a good sign that your body is reaching a state of under recovery. But you don't want to pull the trigger too early because you could be having the best workouts of your life during that phase. But if it's trending and trending, and it keeps going down, keeps going down, yeah, man, my numbers have been pretty shady for a week, I probably need to recover my sleep. Now I'm looking at subjective measures like, Oh, man, I'm not sleeping. Well, I'm waking up to pee a lot at night, my hunger is going away. I don't really feel like training. okay this is your body telling you something this is that oil lights come on in your car it's now time to repair the oil light and then go right back into training again and i like the biometrics because you can't really fake them the number's the number right and if you take you know you can take three measurements kind of do the average of everything to try to make sure it's consistent but it gives you it allows you a biological quantifiable measurement of where your body's going. Right. And you're right. A lot of the trainers, when I teach them this stuff, they get stuck on these numbers and they're like, Oh, if I'm not hitting my numbers, Oh, that's not good. Look, you, you put them to the numbers where they feel the best. You make sure the numbers go the wrong direction for a period of time. And then you bring the numbers back up using recovery methods. Right. One final thing before we start to wrap up, you mentioned there for most of your gen pop clients, you use a low carbohydrate to maybe very low carbohydrate phase, at least initially for a number of weeks. What is the rationale and reasoning you use? And how does that typically play out? Well, because most of the people that come to us are coming to us because they fuck themselves up, right? More body fat you have, the more inflammation you're going to have, and the less you're going to be able to appropriate energy in the right way. And there's a reason you're getting fat, like everything the body does does for a reason, and whether that's good or bad. So I assume when you come in, you've probably got some of this metabolic mayhem. And if I take your fasting blood sugar and I see that, okay, my range for that is I like people being somewhere between like maybe 4.1 to 4.8, right? If it's above that, it's not time to freak out. It's just time to probably do a little bit more and start thinking about other things we can do. But if you, I've got guys that come to me with 6.1, 6.5 and they're trainers and they've got an eight pack and they've got veins on their elbows and, but they're there. Yeah. But they're pre-diabetic, their hair's falling out. they have an intolerance to cold like they've got all the functions of metabolic syndrome and thyroid dysfunction and it's not any type of disease it's a dis-ease that they've done to themselves through inappropriately they're using the wrong tools at the wrong time and using a sledgehammer when you should probably just use a little tiny hammer you know and and so we use this stuff to say okay if i see all this stuff's all messed up you're you have fatigue you can't think you're not sleeping well okay all right so let's just go ahead and do a washout and let's put you in a, a, a caloric deficit right off the bat for just a small period of time by eliminating the carbohydrates. And then maybe not even putting them in a caloric deficit, maybe even putting the maintenance. We do everything based on how much they're training. So the more you train, the more we feed you. So I'll have guys that come to me that they need 5,000 calories because they're training 15 hours a week. Um, so yeah, maybe we'll pull those carbs out, replace it with a lot of protein and fat. And then after, you know, three or four weeks, now we'll start parlaying some of the fat into carbohydrates and that type and start slowly lowering the fat, raising the carbohydrates until they don't feel good. And then we'll back that out. And that's how we just, you, it's a constant battle of, of tweaking things here and there until you find what's right for them and then slowly modifying it as they change. Right. So essentially that, that low carb phase can be useful because on one hand you may have someone who is pre-diabetic and whilst not necessarily necessary it probably useful if you have less exogenous glucose if you in a pre state And then secondly maybe to kind of restore some metabolic flexibility If like you say they not used to being able to access some of this. Absolutely. And we use lactate as well. So, um, we talked earlier about the cell kicking glucose and the pyruvate kicking as lactate. So I have a lactate scout, so I can take their fasting lactate and see, and you'll see a lot of these people that they, if they went into an emergency room and the doctor saw what their lactate levels were, they would assume they were septic and they had some type of infection and they were going to die. Like I've seen people with 4.8 millimoles and it should, you really, it's like, you're looking at one, one, 1.0, 1.2. Um, what this is telling me is they probably don't have a disease. They're probably just misappropriating where they're putting things. So the, the thing you're going to make energy out of the fastest and most likely to have issues with is glucose. So for me, a lower carb diet at first may be a good idea, but I love carbs. The carbs are for performance and I want to get them eating as many carbs as they can as fast as possible up to, up to their tolerance. Right? So, you know, when you look at all the long-term studies on low carb versus low fat over a 12 month period, it doesn't really matter, right? For most people, but from a short term period, it might be good to give them two or three months of a lower carb diet and then raise them up into a moderate carb diet after that when they can now utilize that and they feel awesome and that's a whole discussion for for another day too i guess uh so before we wrap up where can people find you on the internet we do a lot of stuff on instagram and i i hate social media so i do we do what we can so it's uh muscle nerds underscore health and they can also find me if they like memes and jujitsu stuff at luke lehman lea man on instagram they can find us on YouTube. I think it's muscle nerds health or muscle nerds, something like that. Um, you can tell my wife does most of this stuff. Um, and then, you know, Facebook muscle nerds. And then if they need to contact us for any of the seminars we do or for training or any of that stuff, it's info at muscle nerds.net. Perfect. I'll link all that stuff in the show notes. So for everyone listening, go and check that out. Uh, Luke, this is the final question that we come to, to always round out the show. It can be to do with anything, even completely outside of what we discussed today it's simply if you could advise people to do one thing each day that would have some positive impact on any area of their life what would that one thing be i give you what i consider the two most important things to be number one is meditate if you don't know how to meditate i i'm horrible at it so i use guided meditation so i use headspace i just got one from ben pokulski this weekend um it's called i think it's called waking up by sam harris yeah that's the one i have on my phone i did that actually it was pretty good i like it um i like the headspace because the guy for whatever reason his voice just puts me in a weird trance i don't know what it is um but yeah even if it's three minutes a day right just do something get a hobby and move more perfect man thank you so much for uh talking to me today thanks for having me sorry for holding you up from your food let's try and get you fed now ramen time right yeah let's do it so that was luke lehman i hope you enjoyed our conversation and if you want to get more information about luke or get any links to anything we discussed throughout today's episode or get a transcript to this or previous episodes then the show notes are going to be up at sigmanutrition.com episode 268 so if you go there you can get all of that good stuff while you're on the website a few things that you might want to check out first of all if you are not on the Sigma Synopsis email, then you might want to sign up for that completely free. It's just one short email I'll send you every week. You'll get a quick bullet point list of various different interesting things from around the web that I think you might enjoy. So that could be a recommended podcast, a video, it could be a lecture, it could be a research paper, and there'll be a list of all those things from the week that might be useful. I'll put in some news and announcements now and again as well and then a lesson of the week too so it's super short you can literally scan through it in 20 seconds pick out what you think is cool and then go use that so if you are interested in getting that email from me then go to sigmanutrition.com and just look for sigma synopsis and pop in your email address and you will be getting that apart from that just to reiterate what i said the outset of the show if you are interested in getting access to the sigma live sessions recordings they are now up on the website too go to education.sigmanutrition.com if you want to get those and apart from that thank you for listening in again i hope you enjoyed this discussion a bit sparked something off and i look forward to chatting to you in the next episode until then take care