The Personal Trainers Trainer - Luke Leaman

# The Personal Trainers Trainer - Luke Leaman

**Channel:** The ATP Project
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

Welcome to the ATP Project, the personal trainer's trainer. In today's podcast, Matt, Steve and I interview Master Coach Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds and what I describe as a holistic master trainer who applies fact-based research into best practices for training, nutrition and performance. Luke lays out what he believes is missing in the industry and how Muscle Nerds approaches many of the high-level issues facing PTs and their clients today, such as the controversial topic of how best to use cardio to burn fat, maximizing performance through training and nutrition that does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. We cover a lot of ground over training, getting past a plateau, high-intensity training versus steady-state cardio, supplementation, as well as testing out Luke's knowledge on some listener FAQs. As always, the information in this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please discuss any information in this podcast with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle. Stay tuned, the ATP Project is about to start. Welcome to the ATP Project, delivering the irreverent truth about health, aging, performance and looking good. If you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, ready to perform at your best or somewhere in between. Then sit back, relax, and open your mind as Jeff and Matt battle the status quo and discuss everything health-related that can make you better. Welcome to the ATP Project. You're with your hosts, Matt, Jeff, and Steve. And today we have with us special guest star, Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds. Oh, star. G'day. How's it going? G'day. I've been working on my accents. Yeah, I was going to say, mate, don't try and pass off as an Aussie because you're a Blatant Texan. Mate, so thanks for coming on the podcast, mate. It's good to have you. Yeah, it's great. Thanks for having me. So Luke, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do in the industry, sort of what your profession is and how you help people. Well, I'm a Pisces and I like long walks on the beach and candlelight dinners. And yeah, so I'm the owner of Muscle Nerds and what we do is we do some online training, mainly specializing in general population and coaches and physique athletes as well. And then we also have the education side of it. So for the past five years, I've traveled lecturing all over the world, first for another company I won't name. But I left that company and decided I wanted to do something a little different. You can mention the name of that company. Well, it's Voldemort Group is what we call it. Okay, you don't want to know. That's fine. But for a well-known company that was selling a lot of nutraceutical-based products. Yeah, exactly. And we wanted to take a different direction and teach a little bit more science-heavy stuff, stuff that was more research-based. And so that's what we've done. And we've been traveling. We've gone, we're now a little over two, almost two and a half years into it. We've had about 600 coaches come through our programs. And we're out basically doing the same thing you guys are doing, which is trying to change the industry. Trying to make the industry better and actually bring some real science instead of a lot of the bro science and placebo type things. I love that. So you're training mainly the trainers. So you target mainly the Cert III and IV trainers? Right. We basically specialize in training the people after they've gotten their Cert 3-4 or whatever type of CPT that they've gotten. So depending on which country, because every country is a little bit different. So you guys have a bit of a larger process to become a personal trainer here, which is good. But it's also not good as well because the material you learn there is very basic. So you get guys that they don't have any science background. They go into the Cert 3-4. they don't spend enough time learning the actual physiology. They just kind of brush over that, and they get right into sets and reps and squats and things like that, and then they turn them loose, and they actually don't really know a lot about how the body actually works. So that's what we do. We teach basic and intermediate biochemistry. We teach basic physiology. This is how the cell works. This is how your muscle contracts. It's all the stuff that they didn't see the value in why they needed to learn it until they get into the industry and they go, wow, I need to know this stuff because I actually don't know how a muscle contracts. Right. And so you go through everything from not just putting together a program in terms of, okay, you're lifting X amount of reps, but you're also looking at nutrition, you're looking at hormones, you're looking at biochemistry, you're looking at energy pathways in the body. You look at the body holistically from a point of view of helping people to achieve whatever performance it is. And it may not be getting on stage. It might be someone playing football, soccer for our American-Australian friends. Or gridiron for the American guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, right through any type of sport, whether they're trying to get just fat loss or muscle gain, and you start by looking at your customers or training those people to look at people individually and then tailoring programs for their needs Is that correct Correct The first 20 years of my career was based on basically how to train pro athletes and how to train collegiate athletes and things like that And I didn train a lot of them because the area I was in, I basically only trained general population, maybe a couple of pro golfers, some pitchers and things like that. And when I got actually traveling over the world for the other company, I found that everyone's learning how to train pro athletes, but nobody knows how to train Mary Muffintop. They're clueless. They try to fit them into training like really intensely and sprints and all this, and they're not taking care of their health. So when I started Muscle Nerds, I said, we want to do health over performance because everyone else is doing performance, but they're not doing the health aspect. So you end up getting, even the coaches that we specialize in, they come to us after they've been training for a long time and they look fantastic on the outside, but they have stage one, stage two hypertension. They've got a waking and resting heart rate of, you know, in the nineties, their heart rate variability has crashed. They're stressed out, their hair's falling out, their low testosterone, low thyroid, but they look amazing, but they come to us because they don't feel amazing. And then when we look at things like their organic gases testing, we look at their bloods, they're, they're fantastic on the outside. And they look like a 700 year old person on the inside. They literally 24 year old looks like He's got one foot in the grave. And I said, man, this stuff's got to stop. And you expect that when people are competing. But a lot of these guys aren't competing. There's nothing healthy about competition. If you do a bodybuilding show, especially at a high level, there's going to be a bit of unhealthiness that you have to do to win. But the entire year doesn't have to be like that. And then they start training general population people, and they start using those techniques. And, you know, chronically under eating and leading to binging and purging and really poor relationships with foods. And we end up getting the people after they've really messed themselves up, and now they have to unfuck themselves. And the majority of the industry, especially in general population, they come from a background of Flex Magazine, muscle and fitness, training the pros. This is how the pros train. So Joe Average needs to train like that, and they don't. And the majority of your clients that come to you in the general population, they don't want to squat 200 kilos. They couldn't care less. It's not going to help them walk up and downstairs, play with their kids. They want to be more mobile. They want to live without pain. They want to sleep better, poop better, think better. They want better moods, better relationships. And most of them don't even want to be shredded. The majority of our industry, especially the physique athletes, seem to think that when a guy comes to you, he wants to be dick-skin shredded. But at the end of the day, he probably just wants to be unfat. And those are two different things. Most guys want to look down and see their feet. And it's all the same process physiologically, but there's different extremes that you go to. And our industry is a big industry of extremes. You go to these guys, they go, it's all weightlifting, fuck cardio. Then you've got the guys that say, oh, low carb is the way to go, no, high carb is the way to go. And at the end of the day, you have to find out what works for each individual client. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I used keto a few years ago, and it worked really well for me. Whereas Tony, when she used keto, metabolic crash, energy just absolutely dives, and she ends up not being able to try it. So, you know, and this is the thing we talk a lot about the microbiome. And in fact, we're doing a podcast with, we're invited onto another podcast with some trainers, really, really good blokes. And we were talking about the importance of looking at people as an individual. And you've got your genetic polymorphisms, which everyone's different with that. The makeup is different. Your gut's different. There's so many things. We are individuals. And if you just try and use one size fits all, you're not going to get the results. One of the questions I did have, and I'm going to throw it over to Matt and then you guys are going to talk on a whole new high science level. But one of the questions I want to ask, Luke, is without naming names of companies, what are the things that frustrate you most about the industry, the perception or the practices that a lot of personal trainers or master coaches are doing out there that is really upsetting you in terms of its wrong information being perpetuated? Oh, my God, this is going to be a really long talk. And it's going to be a really long rant because I've been in the industry my entire life, and I've been all over the world, and I've trained thousands of coaches. And the major one is too much bro science. Like there is a need for empirical observation, right? We know that. But you also have to get into the science because the science will tell you if something actually works and why it works. And so for my company, we went out. We see every other education company is telling you what to do, but they're not teaching you why it works and when to use it correctly. So it's like if you have a toolbox. Like you wouldn't take a skill saw out to hammer a nail, but that's what they do. And you wouldn't take it if I said, okay, we're not going to use a skill saw because that's not the right tool for the job. I want to use a hammer. You wouldn't use a sledgehammer. You would just use a regular hammer. And use the sledgehammer when you need it. but everyone tends to go right to the sledgehammer because they don actually know how the body works And then you get people that do crazy 12 transformations and they do unrealistic things to get to an unrealistic goal and they not ready for it because they haven actually prepped the body and gotten the body healthy first. So we have a concept we call prepping the prep. If you come to us and you want to do a show, you're not allowed to pick your show. We will pick your show for you because we're going to get you in the best physical state possible first, get you close to where you need to be, now you pick a show. By doing it that way, we don't encourage like stupid things with your training and your diet. You know, we emphasize sleep. We emphasize adding more calories, adding more carbs, then adding more work instead of chronically underfeeding and overworking people. Because when you do, you can get away with that a lot. Like we'll get girls that maybe they decide they want to do a show because their best friend just did a show that looks like a lot of fun. So they'll do a show and they say, wow, that was great. And you say, okay, now we need to kind of pull you out of this and get your body back to homeostasis. and then we'll pick another show when you're ready. Well, there's another show in two weeks. I'm already shredded. I might as well do that. So they do that show, and they do okay. And then, well, there's another show in two weeks. So they keep doing show after show. They do four or five shows in a row. Then they get a stress fracture, or they get sick, or something happens, they can't train, or they start binging because they've been chronically under-dieting, and now their brain says, I need food. I'm not making energy appropriately. So then they go on huge binging weekends or weeks, and they put on 20 kilos in four weeks, and now it won't come off no matter what they do. Because their body's like, no, you're not tricking me this time. Yeah. But that's a big problem there. The other thing is, man, our industry is a bunch of ego freak, narcissistic people with mommy and daddy issues. And I'm one of them. I competed in powerlifting for a decade and a half. I competed in physique. I trained these people. The one thing that coaches need to learn that is not being taught is how to have empathy for your clients, how to actually give a shit. They're too busy masturbating to before and after pictures of 12-week transformations. All right, well, let's see the after the after pic. Let's see a year later how much in trouble your client is now. You're not beaten off to that, are you? Because they just don't care. They only care about stroking their own ego. Right. And that's one of my pet hates too within the industry is that you touched on something before, but if you teach a man only how to use a hammer, everything starts looking like nails. And the problem is that's when the people – now, for us as an educational people, for us it would be easier to just teach black and white. If we just gave simple rules and taught people how to wreck any argument and just go back to these simple rules, give them a couple of references that they can pump out all the time, then we can give them a black and white statement, ignore the grey area. But the grey area is actually what everything is. And what happens, people then get biased, they get opinionated, they get sold that there is one way that will work for everyone and they'll justify it a certain way. And if people aren't getting the results they expect, then they accuse that people are lying or not following this system or it works for me, it works for everyone else, it should work for you. One of my pet hates is people think that there's one way that will work, but we know that there's different ways that work in different people, but they work in those people in different times. So, for example, every individual will need to chop and change their diet strategy depending on the season, depending on their stages of evolution, meaning their preparation for an event or post-event and that sort of stuff. So my biggest issue is that people will pick a strategy or a style. That way is 100% correct. Everything else is wrong. And if you don't fit in with that, then there's something wrong with you. And what you're saying with the empathy, all those sort of things I agree with. but my big thing that I always go back to is I don't see anyone teaching a lot of these coaches and personal trainers actual ways to monitor and measure and know when to switch between the strategies you know so you see a lot of these people they'll do testing to perform it you know like doctors will do a blood test to give a diagnosis so they can give a prescription you see a lot of pts and that will be doing a certain amount of testing to give a diagnosis to give a prescription because that's their hammer that they give to everyone do you have things that you teach guys to teach them um for people in the home to know when they've adapted you know like everything we're doing here muscle gains and adaptation fat losses and adaptation when have they adapted to that adaptation and hit a plateau and know to change do you do do you test those sort of things do you like is it blood testing or is it pulse and blood sugar and heart rate yeah so i've got I have 100% agreement with you. We like to use things that don't require a doctor because you never know, depending on which country your client is in, they may or may not. Like if I'm training somebody in America, I can order all the testing I want. I just go to directlabs.com. They order it. They go into the lab. They email them back the results. We interpret the results, tell them what to do. But what we prefer to do is just treat things empirically, which is something that I learned from Dr. Alex Vasquez. Before you start ordering worth of labs let see what we can do in the first 12 weeks and if it not resolved then we start ordering the testing because we want to save you as much money as possible because you already paying us I don want you to have to pay another so I can get bloods and organic acids and the CDSA and the parasitology and all that stuff. Because what I've found is the majority of the issues that people have, they can all be fixed with very simple supplement strategies or nutrition strategies or even lifestyle strategies like what we call least mode, which is the opposite of beast mode. A lot of people are beasting their lives. They're stressed out. They're tired. They're sick. They're inflamed. They're not sleeping. They have no sense of community. And so we try to pull them away from that. There's no reason to beast yourself out in the gym. You've got to get your body in a good order first. So yeah, most of the stuff that we'll give people is stuff that they can do at home using their Android or their iPhone. So we use things like Elite HRV which tracks your heart rate and tracks your heart rate variability. So if somebody's waking up and they have a high resting heart rate, then we know there's some type of stressor. And or their aerobic to anaerobic energy systems aren't balanced out because most people are way too driven into the anaerobic zone, and most trainers will train their clients, and they'll hit training and lots of high lactate training to somebody who's already overproducing lactate through faulty energy systems. A lot of our industry, go back to that whole fuck cardio thing, they're scared to death of aerobics because they've had gurus tell them that aerobics make you fat and aerobics make you weak and all this stuff look at a marathon runner well i don't know if you've ever seen an actual competitive marathon runner they're shredded they're tiny but they're like i think the average is like five percent body fat yeah it's not conducive for getting big and weight lifting but there's also there's also consequences to getting really big yeah exactly and that's a that's a whole another topic as far as it's called cardio for cardiovascular health isn't it well that's right muscle but see part of the problem is why do people do cardio? What is the industry? The average industry trainer, why would you do cardio? To get lean. To get lean. To burn body fat. To burn calories. Sure. But you have to realize that's not entirely true. Okay? So every different type of cardiovascular conditioning protocol has a different adaptation. So we go back to the said principle, specific adaptation to impose demand. If I want a specific adaptation, I have to give it this specific demand. So if I have someone at a really high heart rate when they wake up, I have to assume that they have probably pretty poor cardiovascular health, especially high blood pressure. The new guidelines for blood pressure, they've lowered it down to 120 over 90. If you're over 120 over 85, I believe it is, if you're over that, you're pre-hypertense, which puts probably almost the majority of the population. If they just spend a good five or six weeks doing some aerobic work, they can drop their blood pressure 20 points and also drop their waking heart rate and drop their stress levels and then they can maintain that very easily and start doing that. Go to hit after that. Go to hit when you've got your cardiovascular system working well and your breathing mechanics working well, and it all works a lot better. So like most people out there, the cardio-style training, it's either prevention of disease, getting fitter, cardiovascular health, improving your aerobic fitness, basically. Other things for cardio, people talk about glycogen depletion. depletion. Now, can you achieve glycogen depletion through a slow and steady walk, or do you have to have a certain amount of intensity? Yeah, absolutely. It depends where you're talking about where do you want the glycogen to be removed from, because at a certain VO2 max, if you go higher than that, you're going to start depleting skeletal muscle glycogen. If you go below that, you're going to start depleting liver glycogen, right? So it really just depends what you're trying to do. So a long, slow, steady walk is going to rapidly deplete your liver glycogen whereas weightlifting and sprints and running in the cardiovascular zone other than aerobic zone is going to deplete your skeletal mass and in an individual that's going to change as well as their fitness changes so for example if they first start is it correct me if i'm wrong but is that when they first start are they going to be different and then as they get fitter are they going to have to hit a different vo2 max or something to achieve that glycogen depletion in the skeletal muscle possibly not hit a different vo2 max but your vo2 max changes so an average weightlifter is going to be a vo2 max in the mid 50s right whereas uh somebody who's a long distance runner is going to be up in the 80s and 90s so what you want to achieve is a high vo2 max while still maintaining your muscle mass and still being able to grow which can easily be done if you do a steady block of aerobic activity you can get your vo2 max up and you can maintain it with very little work so how do you measure that is there do you have tricks from vo2 max measuring or you there's machines that'll do it but and there's calculations that you can kind of estimate yeah but it's a lot like body fat measurements you know unless you have the right equipment you're just kind of guessing yeah you know when you like people using calipers i hate using calipers i tell people not to use them because they're horribly inaccurate you can have a they can be off 10 percent we measure grip strength don't we grip yeah strength of the body fat yeah right but i mean if all things are equal

based on calipers. I mean, let's say you go to a coach, same time of month, and he's proficient at it. I mean, even if it's out, you're still getting a record of measurement, so you should be able to. And obviously, and all coaches that I know always say, nothing replaces the visual inspection, obviously. But in terms of taking calipers from the same person, from the same time, same month of experience, you should be able to get a good indication of whether you're improving or not. Yes, but that's the conversation of accuracy versus precision. right you know is it accurate no but is it precise yeah as long as you're if you're what i used to tell people when i when i taught courses on how to take body fat measurements i said look if you're really shitty at this just be consistently shitty and you're fine right because you're what you're looking for is you add up all of the all of the millimeters and you say okay i'm looking for like a five to ten drop in millimeters every single like every week and that you know that you're going well we'll typically use circumference measurements because i can teach a monkey how to do that it's not a problem and you know they make a device like myotape that's really good it's it keeps the same pressure every single time you measure something so i'm looking at you know are they maintaining arm mass calf mass and leg mass because if they're if they're becoming catabolic those are the first places you're going to lose muscle is your extremities right that's excellent anyone can do that anybody i can with me because i we train a little over 100 people online i can get them to pick up a 19 plastic piece of equipment and i can be sure that they're doing it correctly because i can send a photo that shows how to do it and then all they have to do is wrap the device around you hit the button and it goes to the same exact pressure every time so yeah that is really cool because that's the hardest the hardest bit is to know is when when you need to change when you've hit a bit of a plateau when you've adapted to the adaptation right mainly so we've got to keep because there's not one diet that's going to work for everyone all the time and there's not one style of training that's going to work for everyone all the time so each individual needs to be a change, huh? That's one of the main challenges. And that goes back to my pet hate with some of the PTs and a lot of those people out there are very vocal about a thing. So this one thing is going to fix everything, where it's not the case. Even if it does in one person, it's only temporary. That person will adapt, and then it will stop working in them as well. You've got to put the personal back in the personal trainer. Yeah. It's personal because you're supposed to be taking measurements so then you can manage them because you can only manage what you measure. But the person, that's the priority, the client. The client, not the trainer. That's right. And you get that all the time where somebody says, okay, this system works really well for me. Ketogenic diet works really well for me. And then they give it to every single client because it worked for them. And it might work in 30% of their clients, but they failed 70% of their clients. But if you don't learn the physiology, you don't know what the adaptation is going to be. And that's what we teach. This is what happens when you do a set of 10 reps at this time of retention with this incomplete versus complete rest. This is what happens when you do cardio conditioning. This is what happens when you do aerobics. This is what happens when you do HIIT. And by figuring out how the tools operate, you can pick the right tool for the job. So everyone can get a starting point following your systems, and everyone can know when to measure and monitor and know when to change, which is brilliant. And what you said before, too, is really cool because the 2018 summit going on now for the genetic polymorphisms, the SNPs and the MTHFR gene polymorphism people, the funny thing is, it's about 15 years on since we've had all of these, like a lot of these genetic testing done where people were compounding and prescribing really high-end, complicated prescriptions to treat these genetic polymorphisms. The summary from this year's summit is you don't treat them. So after 15 years of us doing all of this testing, finding all of these things, don't treat them, don't go in with these hardcore treatments, it doesn't work. The first thing you've got to do is detoxify your environment, detoxify your foods, take the burden off your genes, take the burden off your body, provide yourself with basic nutrition to make sure your genes are capable of doing their job so they're not using up the nutrients in the toxic foods to clean up the toxic foods, you know. So the funny thing is it's the highest end scientific stuff with all of those thousands of dollars worth of testing you mentioned, Those guys are saying do the testing because that's their job, but they don't say don't treat it. And they said do the same thing for everyone, clean eating, clean lifestyle, healthy. But one of the important things that's coming out of this genetic summit is exercise. So there's a certain amount of exercise we have to do to support our genes, but if we do too much, we can actually add burden to our genes and damage them. How do we know our window? Because this is one of the things that I love about what you do is you've got these ways of teaching people how to know if they're in the right window or if they're doing themselves harm. But the rest of us, I mean most of us, especially if you're overweight, you honestly think, I eat too much, I don't train hard enough, and I go to the gym to punish myself for all of that eating and lack of training How do I know when I in the right window and I not where I deserve to be punished to a certain degree but have I gone too far you know Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. So here's the way I teach it. When you look at weightlifting, when you look at supplementation, when you look at nutrition, okay, it's the body's a lot like a computer. You're basically just feeding it information. And I grew up in computer programming. And so we've got a saying, garbage in, garbage out. If you feed the computer the wrong information and code, it's going to spit out the wrong information. So just because you can do a little bit more or eat a little bit more, eat a little bit less or take a bunch of supplements, that doesn't mean it's good, right? So like you'll get guys that they'll come into the gym and you'll just kill them in legs and they can't walk for a week. Well, you probably took that a little too far. And in most cases, most programs have too much volume and too much intensity together. It requires very little work to make the body move and change. And that's just something people don't understand. They think more work is better, but that's not exactly the case. You know why a good coach, any, anyone can just slaughter someone in the gym. A good coach can get results on the least amount of work possible. And with people being so stressed out and having so much to do, they don't need their training and their nutrition to be like another fucking job. And that's what it is. Send me your 42 pre-prep meals, uh, send it to my Instagram. I want to see it every week. And I've got, I know guys who that's what they want. They want their client to send them pictures on a Sunday of all of their meals for the week. And I think that's ridiculous. Just teach people how to eat correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Which is something that, uh, John Berardi and precision nutrition does really well. And I, I took my PN one and I'll be honest, it's, it's not a, for me, it's not a great nutrition course. If you want to learn science of like biochemistry and this type of nutritional biochemistry and how it works, but it's an excellent coaching course and how to get your clients to actually do it and not make it like a, like another job for them. Right? Because if you make it overly complicated, people aren't going to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not bad. Very interesting. I mean, you mentioned before about cardio and resistance exercise. I'm a fan of doing both and guilty I'm a marathon runner. I do the odd marathon every year. And I've found that being cardiovascular fit actually helps me in the gym. Does that sound weird to you or does that sound like it makes sense to you? Then that's one of the misconceptions. The aerobic system is what replenishes creatine, phosphate and ATP. So if you want to have better performance in gym, If you want to be able to do more volume in the gym, if you want to recover between sets, you have to have a really good aerobic system. And this is, again, it gets back to the physiology. Coaches aren't learning this stuff. They learn from somebody's uncle's girlfriend's gardener that used to be a bodybuilder in the 60s that, yeah, you don't do cardio because it's going to make you fat and weak. But the fact of the matter is it makes you better work capacity, and it gives you much more recovery not just between sessions but inside of the work set to set. Your performance will go up. Yeah, because I can do more squats because my heart rate returns back to, you know, and you get in and out quicker. And I see guys there that are hanging out over the machine for five minutes. You know, they're recovering, you know, from just doing squats or something like that. It's very stark to me. So I'm a big fan of doing, you know, a good level of cardio. You know, last night I went for a swim at the pool. That was good. Did some cardio there too. And I think it helps, you know, in the gym this morning. I think it helps. I think it's a rounded exercise. and worse still, you say your uncle's brother's sister, someone, you see it on Facebook. People come out and they've got a good body and all of a sudden they're an expert? Have you seen those sort of people on Facebook? Yeah, and I've also seen a lot of the labs and they don't look good on the inside. They're dying on the inside, look fantastic on the outside. But again, it's an industry of extremes. So when people go, well, you don't want to do cardio because of this, well, they're talking about marathon runners. Don't do cardio because it inhibits your muscular gains. Yeah, if you overdo it, but it's in a dose-dependent manner. Of course it is. So if you go out and run a couple of three or four 30-minute runs a week, that's not going to limit your muscular growth. Look at me. I'm super muscly, and I run three or four times a week. Can't stop looking at his table. Yeah, and it's just the misconceptions. They take something they read in the abstract because they're too lazy to actually pull the whole study and read a 50-page study and find out what the limitations are, what was good, what was bad, and they just take somebody's word for it and they say, okay, your cardio is bad. And it's not. It increases your performance. It enables you to lose body fat much easier because you need oxygen and you need a good cardiovascular system to drive the electron transport chain. Yeah, absolutely. And also, it's good to have good muscles, but it's also good to see them. Have you heard that saying? That's what cardio does. It helps you see the muscles. Well, that's interesting because the guys that are the screwed cardio mob, They're very vocal about that, Steve. And they've demonstrated the fact that they can get very lean without doing cardio. But I hear what you saying that in terms of the long health for individuals and for increased performance that cardio is obviously extremely important Absolutely Study after study showing cardio benefits on the cardiovascular system and all sorts of other systems So you know and I love the fact that you come from a health point of view because a lot of people, you know, there's not too many, there are some that say, oh, screw my health, I just want to look lean. Most people want their health and to look lean and you can do that. That's right. And yeah, you can absolutely get shredded with weights and with eating. Just like you can get shredded doing a marathon and eating. and you can do it with both and the healthy choices to do with both that's the bottom line and research paper after research paper says this it calls it's confirmed we know that's how it works yes and we know that actually you know the whole hit thing hit is not as good as steady state cardio i'm sorry it that epoch effect they're finding out is not that large no maybe like seven percent it you do it's a shorter session of course and not as much work but the majority of people that do hit aren't doing hit as hard as they should be to actually replicate the studies when you look at the studies done on like windgate bikes yes you go and do it where the weight drops on weight you build up the speed first and then this this weight drops down onto the wheel which obviously increases resistance massively i know uh oh what's his name a really popular guy loves it um he loves the windgate bike and he's also talking about pushing a car so putting the car into um oh what's his name oh forget his name anyway and putting putting the car in and basically you know for 10-15 seconds pushing you know that car as hard as you possibly he says you should be absolutely exhausted when you come off the wing gate bike or pushing the car it is like maximum effort for that 10-15 seconds so much so he said effectively if you're not throwing up um you know at the end of the session he goes you have not put in enough effort that's the that's the high intensity he's talking about yeah and that's again you gotta how do we measure the intensity you know with some people is it heart rate and all that sort of stuff again do we know how we go so we'll do some of the assessments we'll do is like a modified cooper's test so we'll have somebody run for 12 minutes and what i'm looking for is what's your maximum heart rate during that time what's your average heart rate and then we're going to compare that to your resting heart rate so the larger the gap is between your maximum heart rate and your resting heart rate the better the healthier your cardiovascular system is. Okay, cool. But you also have to keep in mind that you want to look at that average heart rate too because if the average heart rate is too high, you're way too far on the aerobic side. If it's too low, you're way too anaerobic and the sweet spot tends to be around 80 to 85%. Yeah, okay. So for an example, in 2017, I said, I'm going to start doing more aerobic conditioning because I just didn't feel right. With weightlifting for 30 years, I don't feel right anymore. I'm not sleeping well. I'm not pooping well. all the normal health stuff, and blood pressure was high, stress was high, resting heart rate was high, my HRV was crap. I started doing a lot more aerobic conditioning, aerobic intervals, and long runs, 5Ks and things like that, and I got to the point when I do a Cooper's test at my age, I'll be 40 next month, and at my age, my maximum heart rate based on the theoretical equation should be around 181. I went and did a Cooper's test, and my maximum is 198, which means I basically now have the cardiovascular system of, you know, 20, 21 or 22 year old, which is fantastic. Um, but my average heart rate was too high. So what that means is I can go out and run forever now, but if I were in sprints, I'm going to gas in between sprints really, really bad and I'm not in my power output. Isn't that good? So now I've switched, I've pulled out a different tool and now I'm doing a lot more hit training, a lot more like 32nd aerodyne, four or five minutes rest, that type of thing to bring that percentage down so that I can balance out the anaerobic anaerobic system and you can teach that techniques to people and also to coaches yeah that's what we teach them that's what absolutely so that's the most the biggest challenge that i always found in the general population is that fear of the unknown the variables not understanding when their body's in the optimal zone and when they've gone too hard or not hard enough and that's when the lack of empathy from some of the coaches and then them that's when everything seems to get pear-shaped another thing when we're talking about cardio what a lot of people have to realise is also look at the person again and your lifestyle so for example sitting's the new smoking a lot of this stuff about cardiovascular health originally the study showed that for every one hour you're sitting you need to walk for five minutes you know so if you sit for an hour get up and walk for five minutes then they worked out you know an eight hour day with lunch and all that sort of stuff if you're an office job you'll be sitting for six hours so therefore they said 30 minutes a day walking but it's supposed to be five minutes every hour that you're sitting you know so they said 30 minutes easier just do 30 minutes a day and that'll compensate for six hours of sitting and that'll help your cardiovascular health which you know it's not really the case but um so it's really important for people to understand some of the people out there saying cardiovascular cardio going for a walk is pointless but they might be on their feet all day like a personal trainer walking around the gym working with customers actively moving all day they are walking five minutes every hour okay a laborer and a carpenter all those sort of people they doing at least five minutes every hour For someone that sits in an office desk if you not doing some walking every day to get their cardiovascular health you going to be contributing significantly to heart disease So there are certain people where they say, you know, screw cardio, but they're doing cardio all day. They're moving all day. You know, for other people in the office, you've got to get up and move, otherwise you're going to shut down and stop and your heart will die and then you'll die. Well, the thing is with the guys that are going fuck cardio, they don't realize they're like no I don't do cardio I run sprints but because they don't understand the physiology they don't realize that if you do a 30 second run or sprint and you only rest 60 seconds that becomes cardio that becomes aerobic in nature because you have incomplete rest and if you're not doing it with the intensity yeah you get on it this is what I ran we had a program design we have a program design seminar that goes on that's like you know 12 weeks long you come to a seminar you have all this online material to prep you You come to the three-day seminar, then you get to do it twice, and then you test out of it. And we want to make sure that you understand the concepts. And for a lot of these guys, they're like, man, this has been such a big game changer. I realize now, like, I have so many more tools, and I know why they work. So it's making the way I program is now fun. I, like, want to program. And when they came in, I said, listen, I'm going to show you guys what HIIT training is. I'm going to put each of you on the Airdyne for 30 seconds. We're going to videotape you so you actually go balls out, and everyone's going to scream at you. and they were doing this and you know they go about 15 20 seconds all of a sudden you hear the air start to get softer and softer because they can't maintain their energy system and then they find out wow i have not actually been doing hit training when i think i am because i'm just simply not going hard enough because they were fucked they would do it there were guys that were dry heaving for five or six minutes and i go here's the problem great anaerobic power horrible anaerobic endurance and aerobic endurance so we had another girl there that's uh she teaches um she teaches body combat it's our friend we actually she's uh one of our team members for muscle nerds uh marzo farrow from perth and she has a very good aerobic system the problem is she couldn't produce any power but she would she went as hard as she could and she was ready in two minutes to go again while everybody else was almost puking and dry heaving but it showed them like if i'm going to do hit training it has to be done like that or it's not high intensity high intensity interval training you're just interval training so and and this is um and again i i my it was lane norton who I was thinking of before, by the way, that talks a lot about this. And he's got a lot of really good research, I think, backing up this high-intensity type of training style. But the other training style, and I forget what they call it, it's not fart lick. It's another one where it's like 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off, or 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. What's that called again? A lot of people are using that as their high-intensity type training. And they're saying that that is the most effective way to obviously burn fat. but you're saying no because you can't get the intensity level high enough during the the on the training time the cardio time well it depends what mechanism we're using right so the thing is keep in mind for something to be high intense and to keep that up you have to have significant amounts of rest so if i'm going to do a true hit and do a 10 second sprint i'm going to need probably 90 to 120 seconds recovery all right so if i'm going 10 on 10 off guess what you're doing you're fucking doing aerobics. Yeah. It doesn't feel like aerobics the first five minutes, but as you go, that's aerobics. As the intensity drops. Yeah. The resting doesn't recover. That's it, because volume and intensity have an inverse relationship, and if you're doing a high volume with incomplete rest, that becomes aerobic in nature. And would that be confirmed with your testing of heart rate and pulse rate and all that sort of stuff? You'd be able to show them that you think you're doing high intensity, but you're actually doing a steady-state cardio? I could, or I could just pull out a basic physiology and biochemistry textbook and show them what's actually going on. You know, some of these people need to see the numbers. They won't believe you or they won't believe themselves, but they will believe the numbers showing these numbers show that you're in this zone. As you said before, Luke, empirical information, I think, helps to maybe not quash debate because people argue that, you know, the sky is not blue. But having said that, it's funny because last year when I was playing football, you know, my mate plays centre-back. I play on the wing. His needed steady state. He needed to constantly be moving with the occasional sprints and stuff like that, whereas I was sprinting for 10, 12, 15 seconds, and then I'd be resting for a minute or two or stuff like that. So I actually started replicating that on the devil's tricycle, the Airdyne bike, where I would do a 20-second flat out and then rest for a minute and then do it again. Intuitively, I hadn't read anything, but it just seemed to have made sense to me. That's probably better from what I'm gathering that you're saying than doing that 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Right. The thing is, everything has to be specific. So you have general physical preparedness and you have specific physical preparedness. So in the general phase, that's when you want to get your aerobic base really good because that's going to help the specific phase do better. So then when you're moving into the specific phase, that's when you're starting to do stuff that's more sport specific. Gotcha. So you look at your position. How many sprints do you have to do in a game?

And I know there's coaches here, like rugby coaches, that will put GPS devices on their guys so they can analyze when they're in the aerobic zone, how deep that is. What about your anaerobics? Are you 10 to 15-second sprints? Are they running five meters? And how many times do they do that? And you can create a custom program for them based on what their activity is. That's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, it's crazy. I know Carl Jennings, who is a pretty well-known rugby coach, is a friend and mentor of mine, and that's what they were doing. They were basically watching through the GPS satellite where their guys were and what their activity was, and he was actually able to create these crazy conditioning programs for his guys, and he's created some of the best conditioned rugby players in the world. so apart from the gps tracking in that is again is it all done through heart rate and pulse rate and yeah that's it you you've got it you've got to use like we use an app called polar beat and then we'll use a polar h10 which i found to be probably the the easiest to use and best chest strap monitor and it'll do all the hrv and the heart rate and all that stuff but then it'll also you can monitor through your training and then i can interpret that data of what zones you're in when you need to be in them. Are you in these zones? Have you too long? Have you created the adaptation you need? Maybe we need to switch you off to something else. Yeah, cool. And all that can be done with, you know, virtually. Yeah. You don't have to be in there. No, all they have to do is send me a screenshot and it has all the summary on the front. I can go, okay, this, this, this. Okay, you've maxed that out. We're not doing any conditioning next month. We're just going to lift weights. It might be something like that. But, or, you know, you're talking about the walks. Like, we encourage all of our clients to walk as much as they can. And the reason is the single biggest factor for maintaining your body weight has been your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. People aren't walking. And they've actually, Dr. Ben House, who's a good friend and colleague of mine, he sent me a study. It was the first study to actually confirm how many steps you need to make that work. And they said at bare minimum you need 7,116 steps a day. Wow. Just approximately. It's funny, Tony's bought this watch and this is probably worth weighing into a little bit as well too. I think it's a Garmin and Tony's a smart girl and she was studying for hours over Christmas just working out how to use it. And I know you were saying that a lot of the functions on watches that they claim talking on sleep and all the rest of it are not accurate. But steps, that's accurate. That's accurate. That's a really cool thing. Or it's accurate enough. Yeah. And you can put – we use an app. I like to use the Argus app, and it's almost like Facebook for training. So you can friend people, and then you can look at what they're doing and see how many steps they've had. If they're logging in their other stuff, you can see how much coffee they've had, tea and water. And from a trainer's perspective, I probably shouldn't say this because then my clients are going to be going, oh, my God, that's how he knows that I haven't gotten all my steps today. I can look at my client's stuff and make sure they're getting their steps, and if not, I can call them and be like, why haven't you gotten all your steps? And then they're like, fuck, does he get cameras? How does he know this shit? So 7,000 steps a day, if that's what you kind of need, how much time is that actually spent walking? Would you estimate? So what we'll typically do is have people put a pedometer app like the Argus app, and then I'll say just keep your phone on you all day, and then what I want to see, I want you to average out, if you say 7,000 steps a day over seven days, I need you to do 50,000 steps a week. Right. And if you don't get it in Monday through Friday, then on the weekend you're taking a couple of big long hikes, and you're going to make it up. Right. And by and large, we get people, we've got women that are 120 kilos plus that are losing three or four kilos a week once we get their need up. Right. And it's crazy. And one of the things that they found too is the people with the lowest need, your hypothalamus controls a lot of your hunger and satiety and things like that. They found that the people who are really inactive and not actually getting out and walking, their hypothalamus told them to eat more. they would have a, when they ate, they ate more per meal, and they were never satisfied. And from a dieting perspective, if you're trying to diet to lose body fat, you have to have meal satisfaction. If you don't have meal satisfaction, and that doesn't necessarily mean you've eaten enough or eaten too little, your brain controls whether you're satisfied or not. So if you're getting up from a meal and you're like, well, that kind of sucked, all you're doing is obsessing about the next meal because you're going to want a meal that actually satisfies you. so that people who are more active are better satisfied when they eat why that's just what the science says i'm not sure but the hypothalamus controls all that the hypothalamus is you know it's like the thermostat yeah it controls the hormone called neuropeptide y if you want to know about the itty gritty of that or you know basically that's a that's a neurotransmitter that controls your your appetite and the classic study when they did this on rats was they injected them with neuropeptide by and they ate the food despite it giving them an electric shock. That how much they crave food if this hormone was too high in the brain And that upregulated by inactivity Inactivity and excessive carbohydrate eating And opposed by cholecystokinin Yep, cholecystokinin and all those things. And what encourages that? That's the same sort of thing, but it actually does the opposite. So it actually says you're satisfied, you've had adequate calories, we're all cool, and you don't need to eat now. It's cool. You can see that a lot of this stuff obviously interrelates and overlaps. So can we switch into talking obviously a little bit more about diet? I saw you put up a post on Facebook recently talking about the fact that you've been measuring your blood sugar levels and you've been looking at utilizing low-carb versus, you know, sort of higher-carb, moderate-carb. Luke, what was your sort of, you know, do you want to talk about this? Yeah, absolutely. Great. So do you want to talk about what sort of your theories were, what you were testing on yourself? Absolutely. One thing I'd like to say first is about the CCK, the cholecystokinin, which took me forever to learn how to say quickly in front of a class. It's not an easy word to say. the easiest way to get that up is to chew your fucking food chew, chew because typically people chew, chew, swallow and what they found was if you masticate your food properly if you chew your food until it's a semi-liquid state it raises CCK which then turns leptin down or leptin up which is another satiety hormone it creates a crash in ghrelin which is a hunger hormone and it also increases your pancreas and your gallbladder's ability to secrete what it needs to secrete into the small intestine to actually emulsify and break down your food and absorb it correctly. Of course, you're going to get more saliva as well too, which is going to improve digestion. And that's going to, the saliva, the receptors in your mouth will tell your brain what's coming in so that your body can be prepared to digest it more effectively. And in a lot of cases, the guys that come to me with digestive assimilation issues, if I get them to just chew their fucking food correctly and sit there and relax and enjoy their meal, a lot of their digestive issues goes away. It's one of those things, and Matt's been talking about it a lot, is actually the ability to rest and then digest. So don't be stressed out. Don't be eating on the go. Try not to eat at your desk while you're doing work as well too. That's a big one as well. And even the weird ones with the positive affirmations, you know, basically saying that this food's going to give me the good stuff. If you focus on the good stuff that you're going to take out of the food and not be worried about allergies and intolerances and that sort of stuff, you can actually reduce your degree of allergies and intolerances to those particular foods. Absolutely. The study on the chewing thing, they found that people that chewed their food 40 times versus the controls who chewed 15 times also ate 11.9% less total food. Wow. So what's going to work better for somebody? Me saying, we're going to put you on a hypocaloric diet, or me saying, well, we're just going to eat normally, but you're going to chew your food, and that automatically puts them in a 12% caloric deficit because they're satisfied and they don't need as much naturally. And what if you did both? What if for the people out there, a little trick that you can do is fill up your plate with things that take a lot of chewing? you know that's why there's foods out there that actually give you negative calories you know like the salaries and that sort of stuff that you you'll actually burn more calories in the process of chewing them you'll never get out of them so those things you can have on your plate in unlimited amounts pretty much you know um that's why we did it in my clinic is fill yourself up with these chew these and you'll be tired you'll be sick of eating by and large people don't eat enough fruits and veggies yeah and that's another thing we can talk about is the people's misconception and it makes you fail, which is completely fucking ridiculous. I love that topic. And it's something that we've breached a couple of times where, again, and it's funny because we were talking, having this interview the other day with Jared Hustler and Ali and a few of those guys, Alicia Goins, and who's the other gentleman? Geegan. Geegan. And we were talking a lot about the philosophy around what we stand for. And what we stand for, typically, and if I don't know an answer, I mean, I'm not as smart as you three guys, especially, you know, spending time. I know there's a lot that I don't know, but I always defer back to nature knows best. I always defer back to, you know, whenever you start looking at extreme things, you might be able to move the pendulum over here to the right for a period of time. But naturally, you can't hold back the tide. Naturally, you know, that homeostasis, that's where you want to be. And the variations that occur, you want to be, you know, to either side. But eventually, it has to come back to the middle. Well, fruit is a part of our diet. I mean, it has to be. When people take extreme measures to remove whole food groups out of their diet for long periods of time, that scares me. So I'm looking forward to hearing how you incorporate diet, you know, fruit into people's diet when they're trying to lose body fat. But before we get there, could we talk about the study? Yeah. Because you turned yourself into a sidewalk. My end of one study here. So Freestyle, they do blood glucose monitors. And I've always used like a Freestyle Optium because it measures blood glucose and also ketones. And how does it do that? It does that through a finger prick. Right. So you prick your finger, you put a tiny little bit of blood on it, and then we can track it. And I done that for probably 10 years just to see And I always been a low guy because that the way I was taught That the way to eat And I believe that a lot of the population should probably eat lower carb because they just not active enough But for performance if you not eating carbs if people tell you that a low-carb diet is better for performance, they're fucking smoking crack. They need to step away from the crack pipe because the fact of the matter is carbohydrates, think about what's in the name, hydrate. So you're going to be more hydrated, which is going to make you stronger and also give you more, it's going to give you a lot more leverage and a lot more performance, right? Especially even Steve, when he goes out and runs, what are you going to run out of? You're going to be sweating and run out of a lot of water. So you want to make sure you have proper hydration. So just because a lot of people talk about this, the way that low-carb stuff helps performance is through mitochondrial biogenesis because it's the same concept as the baseball guys will be swinging a weighted bat around before they go out with a normal bat. They swing it harder. So what they do with the low-carb is you go low-carb, put yourself into a place where you can't perform well to force your body to adapt by making more mitochondria. So that way when you compete, you put the carbs back in and you've got more energy to burn more carbs. So it's the carbs still the performance fuel for performance. The actual low-carb phase was a trick to get your body to adapt, to get used to lower carbs. It's like blood doping and everything. Yeah, training at altitude. Training at altitudes, all those sort of things. But you know what else makes your mitochondria healthy? What's that? Carbohydrate. Doing fucking aerobics. Yeah, so what we typically do with people, we'll put them on a prepping to prep phase where we get them a good aerobic base, and then we find out where their carb tolerance is, and then we add some weight training, and then we add more carbs, add weight training, and more carbs, and they get lean and they grow. Instead of destroying their metabolism, we're increasing their metabolism, right? And with carbohydrates, can you break that down a little bit further? I mean, is that predominantly low GI or low glycemic load? What does it look like where it doesn't matter? Yeah, we found that the glycemic load is all bullshit. Right. Because you never eat something by itself. So fat slows it down, protein slows it down. And what they found was glycemic load is variable against different people. So if all of us eat the same carbohydrate meal, we're all going to have vastly different glycemic responses. So the key is to set your metabolism up for success. We work first on mitochondria Because when you look at things like type 2 diabetes, type 2 diabetes is more of a mitochondrial issue than anything. Because what ends up happening is if you're flooding the cell, then you're overproducing hydrogen, you're overproducing lactate. That has to be recycled, and you're not making a lot of energy. So if that glucose doesn't actually get into the mitochondria to go through substrate oxidation where you're making all the energy, you have a cell danger response, and your cells start to shut down, and then you start getting high blood sugar, and then you start getting high triglycerides, and then you start getting the betas. Right. So, um, and that's just a lifestyle thing that happens over decades of not taking care of yourself and not keeping all of your machinery in good working order. So if we, if we can set somebody up and, you know, do a good six to eight week block of a lot of aerobics and we're still lifting weights, we're just not smashing ourselves. And we're doing a lot of like a lot of activity that's going to harness type one and type two, a muscle fiber. So we're doing a lot of, uh, higher rep lifting, teaching clients how to lift. So we're staying like the bodybuilder rep range. and a little bit in the strength endurance. And that's going to give them the musculature where that's where the majority of your mitochondria is. And then we can start lowering down the aerobics and bringing in the sprints and bringing in the weight training. And the fat just falls off of them and their performance goes up and all their health markers get better. So when I did the freestyle test, they have a new freestyle Libre. And you can actually get it online. And you have a little device and then you have an implant that you implant in the back of your triceps and it does a constant glucose monitoring. You tap it to it, and it tells you it graphs everything out. And so when I first started doing it, I was in London, and this was probably four or five months ago, and I was pretty low-carb. I was doing the typical stuff that I used to do. I'm not somebody who can handle carbohydrates. I should cycle my carbs and all this stuff. And I was doing, you know, my performance wasn't all that great when I was losing body fat, but I felt awful. But my blood sugar looked amazing. I was getting some hypoglycemic episodes a little bit Which is probably going to happen sometimes Especially with stress And then I got back here and I said Okay, now that I've been traveling for five years Now I'm going to have a home And I can wake up in my own bed And I can go to my gym And I can get my food and prepare everything You know what, I'm going to do the opposite Why don't I drop the fat down Jack up my carbohydrates and see what happens And you know what happened? I lost 12 kilos in about seven to eight weeks all my strength's up, my performance is skyrocketing, and I'm going into 40, I feel like I'm 16 again, and my libido is starting to come back, which I haven't had a libido in, I can't even tell you, when the last time I had that and if you look at the research low diets will crash all your hormones Long low diets is awful for thyroid health awful for testosterone awful for women cycles Women need approximately 80 grams of glucose a day just to run and make sure that their lady parts stay healthy So it's a matter of knowing when to chop and change. So those things are all appropriate for a person at a particular time of day, even if it's just to shock them into change and then you change? Is there ways that people can, all of those things are, so a low-carb keto system, all those sort of things are suitable for everyone at some stage? It can be, yeah. It's just hard to know when and when they need to change. That's the thing. If you have a dogmatic belief on how nutrition works and how the body works, then you're going to latch on to something that works really well for you. But you have to realize they all work for different people at different times. You know, I tell people the more stressed out you are, the less carbs you need. Because once you start getting stressed out, you start running more fast glycolysis. glycolysis you're not going through substrate oxidation you're not breathing correctly you're hyperventilating because of stress you're not getting enough oxygen there's a lot of things that change and you'll you'll you can observe that for instance if somebody you know not sleeping a lot and they're not really eating well and they're not training like they should and they're stressed out and they go walk up a flight of stairs and their legs feel like they're just in a 12 rep max on the squat yeah that's common but it's not normal and what that's telling me is your energy systems are off and you're not actually using your mitochondria yeah so maybe we cut carbs back a little bit increase some of the more aerobic work maybe we take some supplementation resveratrol pqq things that are going to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and drive those pathways and then when we get your your energy flow your bioenergetics when that gets back in order then we can start smashing you again in the gym yeah and so you said before that you can you murder to your blood sugar and you can see your different energy pathways and that sort of stuff working can you use that same testing with the blood sugar the heart rate and everything to see um stress the effects of stress or when the exercise has been coming too stressful for you yeah absolutely so if if i have someone that's waking up and they have really high waking heart rate and what that tells me is what what raises uh heart rate stress hormones epinephrine right so if they're waking up and they've got a 90 beats per minute which we like to keep them in the 50s you know and uh that tells me that your body basically thinks it's wrestling a bear all night while you're sleeping so they come to me and they go i'm just not sleeping well we start taking their waking heart rate and say well fuck you're sitting at 98 yeah like what what what's your body think it's doing it's in a fight-or-flight mode yeah yeah and you've just woken up yeah you're not going to sleep when you have tons of epinephrine being dumped and the other thing too that's got these cool studies now showing that same thing as um using those same blood sugar monitors and again keeping an eye on heart rate they can actually see whether people are allergic or intolerant to food so yeah they've actually done that same studies now where they've given people where they can monitor their blood sugar changes and they will highlight which foods are bad for them and it doesn't really matter if it's an allergy and intolerance so for us in the clinic you know we do the igg iga testing to tell allergies but you can't really test for intolerance other than symptom picture but if you're monitoring this blood sugar heart rates and that sort of stuff you can see when your body's stressed when it's enjoying work you can see which foods have put you into a stress response as well um so there's so much information you can come from your monitoring and that will give people the power to take control of their own health and know when they're on the right track or the wrong track and how much anxiety with that relief for these people and from a physiological point of view that that's exactly correct i mean adrenaline is released when you're stressed and even if you're eating food that's stressing your body out adrenaline's released adrenaline is also doesn't just raise your heart rate increases your blood pressure by being a vasoconstrictor like if you went to the dentist you know the anesthetic they give in your gums that's often fortified with adrenaline to stop the bleeding so it's a very potent vasoconstrictor so it does drive up blood pressure so blood pressure heart rate are two great markers to see whether your body's stressed to either exercise or to foods so that's correct so that's that they're two great measurements you can use in your in your clinic you add that blood sugar testing into it you'd be able to chart a lot of things in your body that are stressful which are good and which are bad for you and also know when you're in that optimal window to train and which are days that you You should probably skip the intensity and go for a casual walk. You know, that sort of thing. Like, how do you know when to switch off from one phase to another? Well, we're watching the adaptations. Yeah. If I'm doing a bodybuilding show and I'm doing a lot of strength work, well, strength work increases the hypertrophy of the left ventricle, which means that it's going to raise your blood pressure. When you do aerobic work, it increases the inside, the cavity in that. So when you get a guy that's been training for bodybuilding shows and he's like, fuck cardio, So he's going to have a really thick wall, muscular wall of the left ventricle, but his blood pressure is going to go up and his heart rate is going to go up because he's not able to push a lot of blood because you need to expand the inside portion of the heart where you actually pull the blood. So what you want is a good balance. You want a good, a nice big chamber, but then you also want a nice push as well. So that's where,

binding strength training with the conditioning works really well. And on the flip side, when you have guys that do marathons and they don't do any weightlifting, they tend to have too much eccentric hypertrophy of that left ventricle, but they don't have a muscular lining, so then their blood pressure drops. So what they need is a lot more strength training. So that's how we start looking at and interpreting where you're at physiologically and what we need to use. That's excellent. That's probably one of the best descriptions I've ever heard. Yeah, it's called the atrium inside, if you want to know that. But when my mother had a heart attack about three years ago, she survived and everything like that, but I thought, shit, I'd better go to a cardiologist because that's my entire family have had cardiovascular disease. So I got tested by this. My VO2 max is 92, by the way, from the cardiologist, and they checked my arteries, which is a great scan. And this is what annoys me about results-driven and how some medicine is not very scientific. I had no measurable atherosclerosis in my arteries at the age of 46 when I had this test done, none whatsoever the guy had never seen it before and he said i know what they prescribed you yeah he said well what what are you doing and i he said what do you eat for breakfast i said i had six eggs for breakfast he goes oh god don't eat that that'll kill you and this is seconds after him telling me how good my arteries were yeah i had a perfect heart scan you know i got my heart up prescribe you a lipitor uh no actually i was waiting all my lipids are family history cardiovascular get onto it yeah yeah all my lipids were fine but but but in fact i was the results showed that things were working well and he said oh you got to change that now this is what annoys me it's in the personal training industry and it's in medicine it's it's everywhere and it knocks me you know it's it's good that we've got science and results driven and that's what i'm for part of the problem with with the medical industry it's not a health care industry it's a sick care it's a sick care industry right and but there there are good doctors out there there's a doctor from the states called dr spencer nadolski and he called he's got the hashtag doc two lifts So he is a medical doctor but he also does a lot of the weight training and conditioning And he one of the guys that says you know we going to work on lifestyle first before you know i might give you a statin but only as a band and a bridge while you getting your shit together so he got the right idea he got the nutritional background the training background but most doctors simply don't know anything about nutrition or training well yeah that's right they're not trained in too much of it years ago the um the a4m the uh was it the american academy of anti-aging right i i went to a couple of the big seminars i was probably the only doctor not there and they had a certification it was an anti-aging personal training certification so i decided to attend it and get my certification i'm sitting in a room with like 60 doctors they knew nothing about how the body works they knew absolutely nothing i answered every question and then they're coming up to me going who are you doctor who and i'm like i'm not a doctor i'm a personal trainer strength coach from texas yeah they're like what are you doing here i'm like apparently i'm answering your fucking questions and i passed the test perfect score and they wouldn't give me the certification because i didn't have a doctorate medical degree yeah that's nuts i was gonna say how did you get there because i went to the a4m conference uh year before last i've been to a few over the decades and and it's very interesting but some of their things are very very very very well i disagree with dramatically you have a look at the old school stuff like doctors um all the stuff you're talking about with heart rate blood pressure um you know postural changes to blood pressure blood sugar these are the techniques that the doctors know that should be teaching to the people to monitor their own health because this is the most exciting thing for me i mean a lot of exciting things about this podcast but for me the most exciting thing is a lot of science we've known we know this stuff but we've never been able to use it effectively in the real world because we didn't have the technology or the ability to do any of these sort of measurements um life you know live real-time measurements you know in the past it was always refer to a doctor to get these things done but there's the white coat syndrome associated with blood pressure readings of the doctors there um otherwise it big blood tests it this heavy sort of testing or full cardiovascular stress testing and that sort of stuff The ability for us to take little tests and measures and take these little objective and even some subjective measurements but mainly these little things we've been able to say to this person that, man, we're on the right track, this is exciting, actually this is the time for us to change. These are the things that's going to make a massive difference for people's lifestyle and life and get the results they expect. you know yeah there's there's a lot of testing you can do at home just basic things like uh i don't often if i get someone's labs if i get their bloods i don't really look at fasting blood sugar i want them to do that at home because you can buy cheap glucometer like a freestyle freestyle opt-in you can do it at home but because what people don't understand is fasting fasting glucose is very volatile so let's say you wake up and you're walking in the dark to use the bathroom you stub your pinky toe you've already completely destroyed your fasting blood sugar if you get white coat syndrome if you get road rage going in to get it done that number really means nothing on a lap it's better to do it at home where you can have a controlled environment not be stressed out same thing with your blood pressure you can buy a good blood pressure cuff we've got an omron bp 7000 is the one i use i think it was like 80 bucks us it's small and you can travel with it and i wake up in the morning and i'll put my heart rate strap on i'll take my heart rate my hrv and i take my blood pressure every single morning and that's stuff people can do at home where they don't have to worry about that stress of going to the doctor and you can actually take take control of your own health instead of depending on a doctor to try to tell you how not to die yeah and through you guys through the muscle notes you can teach people how to do that and you can teach coaches how to teach their customers how to do that sort of stuff as well yeah that's it that's what we teach that's very cool and here's what's crazy so we were in london and we had i think 40 45 46 people in class and i i carry i take my blood pressure monitor in there to show them and also to track mine and I said you know what you guys are supposed to be the you know the leaders in health and fitness how many of you think you have normal blood pressure or good blood pressure they all raise their hand I said okay we going to pass this around We going to find out Myself and two other guys had perfect blood pressure and everyone else had stage 2 hypertension. Yeah, wow. So you have all these guys that are teaching people how to eat right and be healthy, and they're finding out, oh, shit, I'm 147 over 97. I'm like, yeah, that's stage 2 hypertension. That's medication worth it. That's medication. That's over 140 over 90 for those who don't know what stage 2 is. Yeah, and now pre-hypertension is 120 over 80 or above. Yeah, it's news to me. You know, mine's always a little lower than that, which is good. And my dad's got hypertension. It's called idiopathic hypertension. In other words, they don't know what's causing it for 30 years. You think, you know, wouldn't you investigate this sort of stuff? Well, it's not like it can kill you, Steve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least not immediately, right? But, you know, it's the heart attack that kills you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If I ignore it, it'll go away, right? Yeah. Dr. Alex Vasquez has been saying for years that the gold standard should be 115 over 75. And in the research that he's shown us, if you get from 115 over to 75, a 10-point jump in systolic, so going from 120 to 130, doubles your risk for cardiovascular disease. And then going at five beats for the diastolic. So if you go from 75 to 80, you've got a 50% higher chance of getting some type of cardiovascular issue. Yeah, diastolic is the diabolical one, as I teach my students, just so, you know, keep it pretty simple. But the other one's important too, systolic. Hey, Steve, guess what lowers blood pressure? What? Aerobics. Yes. We're going to finish off. Thanks, Luke, for coming in. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Matt. And we'll be back next week. And, Luke, we'll have you on the show later on in the year. I'd love that. Thanks for having me, guys. And thanks, Jeff. Oh, shut up. Thanks for listening. And remember, question everything. Well, except what we say.