#09 Luke Leaman - Competition prep, Athletic Performance, Crossfit and more

17,893 words · 19 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction to Muscle Nerds and Education Philosophy

CHAPTER 02

Bodybuilding Contest Prep and Long-Term Health

Wicked. And I think just touching on that, obviously with a lot of the educational knowledge that you guys do, I think it'd be a really good segue into the first sort of topic. A lot of people that are listening are bikini athletes, physique athletes, things like that. So how do you guys sort of think about prepping people for, I guess, comp, for stage? Yeah, so, you know, that's, man, that's a big subject, right? So you've got a lot of people that it's all over the place. So you've got like kind of traditional way of bodybuilding and then you've got the more the research base and you got people to kind of blend everything in. And we like to kind of blend everything in. And I'm old school, man. Like when I first started bodybuilding and I got into this, it was 30 years ago. So when I started lifting weights and really training hard, and it was one of those things where back then people weren't so keen for instant gratification. Nowadays, somebody can come to you and say, hey, I just went to a bodybuilding show. I'd like to get on stage in 12 weeks. And you look at them and you're like, bro, you've never lifted weights in your life. You're like 38% body fat. You need a few years of building that physique. If you want a world-class physique, it takes a long time. And that's what people seem to not understand these days. And so kind of where we are is if you come to us to be trained for a show, you don't get to pick your show. We will pick your show. We'll tell you when you're ready. We'll tell you how long it's probably going to take. And the reason we do it like this the reason we like to play the long game is we don want to screw anybody up Despite what people think bodybuilding is not a healthy endeavor right There's no such thing as a healthy competition. It doesn't matter if you're a professional chess player or a bodybuilder or a CrossFit athlete. None of this stuff is inherently healthy. So what we want to do is try to make it as healthy as possible and then get unhealthy when it's time to get unhealthy, which is those last few weeks when you're getting ridiculously lean. So the way we kind of structure things is we work a lot on building up your work capacity, building up your food, building up – like really unclogging your biochemistry so that you're using food the way you should be using it. That way we don't have to starve you going into a show because, I mean, as we know, calories in versus calories out, it is as simple as that to get lean. if you just lift weights and create an anabolic response with the weights you do your conditioning you do your dieting it's very easy to get super lean um but if you only look at calories and calories out you don't understand all the little nuances of what calories out actually means like understanding mitochondria how the mitochondria work how the bioenergetics of things work how nutrition truly works what ends up happening is you just starve yourself you get on stage and then post-contest, you blow up. If you wash, rinse, and repeat this often enough, you get to a point where it's getting massively harder to lose weight and it's getting much easier to put it on. We get people all the time that they're doing too many shows a year, they're staying lean. Once you get lean, if you're a man and you've gotten down to 5% body fat, anything over that seems fat to you, even when you're leaner than 99.9% of the population. You get addicted to being that lean when you try to hold that for a long time your body's going to push back by forcing you to uh to gain weight by altering your satiety signals and your hunger all your hunger signals and then and it's slowing down your metabolism to accommodate not eating enough there's a lot of there's a lot of negative effects that people aren't talking enough about and we get girls all the time they'll do four five four five six shows putting on why they can't get it off despite eating you know 900 calories a day and training 21 hours a week and at that point we have to figure out how to pull them out of this if people would just start start really concentrating on one or two shows a year really have a nice off season make sure that they're doing things correctly building up how many calories they can handle so they don't have to die and starve themselves getting their work capacity up if they just took care of a lot of this uh internal machinery and did that up front we wouldn't have such an epidemic of people blowing up losing their periods having their hair fall out um you know guys having to put get on testosterone therapy because they can't make testosterone anymore that there's all these these issues that are happening because people want it too quickly and they don't want to work uh for a long time for it yeah i think as you said there that instant gratification with the rise of obviously social media like we want to have abs tomorrow and a great ass tomorrow and where we're going to suffer to fucking hell and back just to get there without thinking cool well where are you going to be in 12 months by doing that yeah 100 and you know you can you can you can get you can get stage really ready really fast or you can do it correctly and those two things are not normally not synonymous with each other right there's a base foundational level you need to be at before you decide to do a show and we get people all the time they come in and they're not even lean enough to start getting ready for a show and they pick a show in 12 weeks, then they, they, they can do it. But then it's the repercussions that come after it. Right. So like what we feel, we feel you're ready to start a show when you almost look like you could get on stage or what the average gen pop person would look at you and be like, Oh, are you competing this weekend? And you're like, no, I'm competing in like 16, 20 weeks, you know, cause that's really what it takes, especially nowadays where if you get on stage, you don't have glute striations. You're not even a top five. Right. When I, when I started bodybuilding, it wasn't like that. You know, you just need to be really, really lean. Now you've got to be completely diced in order to win. And some people are, they're, they're a bit delusional about how much muscle mass they have and how much fat mass. Most people are a lot fatter than they think. Um, I've had guys come to me and say, you know, I'm 95 kilos. I think if I lose five kilos, I'll be shredded. I'm like, nah, bro, you're going to have to lose 25 kilos to be like really shredded. And they don't believe me until the first 10 K comes off and they're like, wow, I'm still really soft. Yeah, I told you it's going to take another 15K. They get down to 71 kilos and they're like, oh man, I'm finally shredded shit. I'm like, yeah. Everyone's fatter than they think. What's that? No, you go. I just think that there's not enough people being honest with the general population. Our industry's gotten too much about being money-centric and not enough about being client centric. And when you're focused too much on money and training a bunch of people and you're not giving enough detail and attention to other clients you kind of your philosophy around things starts to move away from doing the right thing and instead turns to becoming an influencer and trying to make all this money and you start doing the wrong thing. So it's very difficult to get massively popular when you do the right things. It's easier to do that when you're doing all the bullshit and you don't care about your clients.

CHAPTER 03

The Problem with Instant Gratification and Influencer Coaching

Yeah, and I think it's what you said before, you need to know the why behind what you're doing. So for anyone out there who has hired a coach, ask them why. Like, it's quite funny to sort of hear people try to come up with an answer when you go, okay, well, why am I doing this? And you know yourself, like often the answer is just completely just fluff and it doesn't even really make any sense. Well, I remember years ago, I'm talking probably eight years ago, when I was lecturing, I realized that probably the best answer for everything is it depends, right? And so I started saying that, but then I would talk about all the things it depends on. Now it depends seems to be the answer that most people give, but then they don't give any clarity because what they're using it depends as a shield because they don't actually know. So they go, well, that depends on a lot of factors. And then they kind of move on and they don't clarify what they mean by that. So if you're asking your coach why you're doing things and what would work best and if they say it depends or whatever and they can't clarify all the things it depends on, then they're probably full of shit. yeah and I think that your client has way more respect for you if you just say I'm honestly not sure but let me do a little bit of research the amount of times that I've said that I'm not going to go out there and say hey look yeah I'm just going to give you a bullshit answer because if that person's actually got you know a thought in their head they'll go and research it themselves and come back to me and say you were fucking wrong yeah yeah you just pulled that out of your ass yeah that's the thing like when we lecture my staff and myself that's we it's very often we tell people i don't know but i'll try to find out for you like you can't possibly know everything and you know sometimes you'll get crazy questions that come out of left field that the people you can never figure out the answer it's best to just go and they doubt and come back to them they respect it a lot more yeah

CHAPTER 04

Post-Show Recovery and Reverse Dieting Myths

no absolutely so when we're looking at the comp prep When people are coming out of that, what are some protocols that people need to be thinking about? In terms of let's go nutrition first, do they need to go straight to their new maintenance? Is it more of a reverse diet protocol? What are your recommendations on that? Yeah, you know what? I'm not a big fan of reverse dieting. The way I see it is this guy's dieted down. Let's take a natural athlete. It's not uncommon for a natural athlete to take 24 weeks to diet down for a show, or they should, right? because the slower you can do it, the more likely you're going to retain lean tissue. And if they don't have anabolic drugs on their side, then they can't really rush it like somebody who's enhanced. So if you ask them to reverse diet out, you're just delaying the inevitable. You might as well focus on let's look at the maintenance and maybe give them like a 10% to 15% off the maintenance, right? And I found that that works a lot better. Um, if, if I will use reverse dieting, if I have someone where maybe they're at some point there was an eating disorder or disordered eating involved, or I tell them, you know, if they're sitting at, you know, 1500 calories, I'm going to take up to 2400. If they look like they're about to hyperventilate and they've got tachycardia, I'm like, all right, all right, let's just try 300 calories. And we just keep trying to raise that as much as we can to get them back up. And one of the reasons why is if you look at, if you look at total daily energy expenditure, and a lot of these bodybuilders, they'll take their energy intake well below their BMR. And once you start doing that, that's when the body says, hey, I don't need to have strong erections. I don't need to have a menstrual cycle. I don't need to make pretty hair, skin, and nails. I don't need to create a lot of body temperature because it starts getting rid of all the things that you don't need to survive and it moves into kind of a survival state where it's only funneling fuel and the things that are keeping you alive. So you've got this massive wiggle room. If we assume that a typical sedentary person, that that BMR could be anywhere from 60% to 70%, and then we layer on top of that non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, thermic effect of food, and then adaptive thermogenesis, whether that's from regulating body heat or maybe that's from exercise, you've got a good 30% to 40% spread there where if you're already dieting at like 40% of your calories or more if you're getting ready for a show, you can probably add a lot of that back and that'll up-regulate thermic effect of food. The minute you eat food, you're going to lose some of that because you're going to burn some calories to process that. You're going to start burning more energy when you train so your adaptive thermogenesis and exercise thermogenesis will go up. And then you going to start moving more naturally subconsciously through NEAT So a lot of that stuff you can actually kind of wipe out because you fueling stuff that is now deregulated You immediately push it back up once you start eating more. So I would rather just give them that. And if they gain a little weight, who cares, right? You're not going to be able to stay that lean forever anyway. So if you go from 5% to 12% body fat after a show, who gives a shit? You're still leaner than the majority of the population. you just at this point think you're obese fat and you're not you're because bodybuilders tend to be delusional if if they can't see a vein in their fucking uh navel but uh i i would rather just pump it up say okay let's let's focus on how much you're training let's focus on your estimated rmr let's focus on some of these other things and let's pump you up to maintenance and then maybe maybe we go to maintenance and pull off about 10 to 15 to 20 percent off the top of that so that i can prove to you you're not actually going to get fat. And then we can play around with some macros, right? You know, the least likely macro to be turned into fat is protein. So what we might do post-show in order to get more calories, then we might pump the protein up to really high levels. Okay, that way we kick up thermic effect of food. We've got a macronutrient that, yes, it can be turned into carbs and that can be turned into fat. But by the time it gets down to the fat level, there's not really that many calories left. So you're safe as pumping that up, right? If you're really lean, most likely if you've done things right, you're probably still really insulin sensitive. So it makes sense to pump the carbs up too and maybe keep the fat a little lower, right? On the low side and then slowly get the fat up at some point. But it's hard for, it's really hard for me to answer this because we set so many things up really well before they compete that we never have clients blow up. But our clients are always eating two to three times more than anybody else at the show because we don't believe in starving them. We plan on building work capacity high, building up the calories. So by the time they get on stage, you know, they're destroying carbs. I've got girls eating 750 to 900 grams of carbs a day because they're burning through it so quickly by the way we set up their biochemistry going into the show and they're very well conditioned.

CHAPTER 05

Metabolic Machinery and High-Carb Prep Strategies

And I guess that's why their preps take so much longer because of that, because you're preparing them for, I guess, the competition. So you're going to go in that at your peak rather than being absolutely depleted, feeling like shit. I mean, imagine playing in the Super Bowl when you feel like absolute death. Like, it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And the thing is, you know, if we set this up correctly and they're already eating a lot of calories, they're less likely to binge after the show because they're tired of eating. And that's one of the first clients I ever put through this type of format that we use. After he got off stage, he texted us and he goes, hey man, can I start dieting now? Because I'm really fucking sick of eating. Because he was eating like 3,500 to 4,000 calories. The guy was only like 60 something kilos in body weight. But what we did, we set him up to where we got that kind of metabolic machinery working so hard that he needed a shit ton of calories even just to keep his weight up

CHAPTER 06

Structuring Cardio and Conditioning for Adaptation

jeez that's impressive that's fucking impressive so what do you do with i guess cardio so would you generally have that relatively high going up into the into the show and do you back it off slowly or is it more of a call we're taking you from an hour a day to 30 minutes a day or something well so first we have to like what are we talking about cardio? Are we talking about aerobics? Are we talking about high-level cardiovascular respiratory training? You've got a way of thinking about, are we talking about sub-VO2 max, which is sub-70%, or are we talking about over that? Everything's a tool. What we prefer to do is we front-load the program with aerobics. Whereas most people will put the aerobics at the end because they're chasing calories. We'll put it at the front because I'm chasing adaptation. I want you building more mitochondria. I want the mitochondria to be working more effectively. I want you to have a massive amount of oxidation going on, which takes oxygen, which means we need aerobic work. So we might do two big blocks of aerobic training, get all that taken care of, and that might be the first, say, six to eight weeks of their training. Then we're going to drop that off, right? And we're not going to really use it. We might use a little bit like maybe some Tabata as a reverse by something that's kind of on that aerobic anaerobic threshold. We might leave that in there a couple of days a week because you don't need a lot of it to maintain your aerobic state. Then we move in more into just weightlifting, right? Because without the muscle, you know, you can be as lean as you want, but if you don't have the muscle, you're not going to be able to show it on stage. You're not going to look good. So kind of like the middle of that building season will be almost all weightlifting. and then as we get close to beginning contest prep we might start

CHAPTER 07

The Importance of Carbohydrates for Stage Conditioning

Then we might throw in more aerobics at the very end so we can keep the calories high. But then it also depends on how much time they have. if you're a very busy executive and you just like to bodybuild if you're like a weekend bodybuilder and you don't have a lot of time then we have to figure out what's most important and at that point eating lower amounts of food is probably going to be better because that doesn't take up a lot of time but if you're another coach and you've got all the time in the world you might be doing a tremendous amount of work going into your show because you've got the time for that and that will enable you to eat far more calories than if we didn't have that in. Then we can also modulate, you know, what is the VO2 max I'm looking for? So often I get people, girls, especially girls, they'll come in and they'll do consults with us and they're a few months out from their show and they decided to stop with another coach because they already lost their period and their hair was falling out and they didn't feel normal. And they're like, I don't, if this is the way I'm going to feel, I don't want to compete. I'm like, well, you're probably going to feel like that at least the last three weeks, but you shouldn't feel like that three months out, right? So what we might do with them is kind of the same process of building up the aerobic base. Then a lot of these girls are eating no carbs because that tends to be the thing now is hashtag fuck cardio and like hashtag fuck carbs, which both of those statements are completely – it's not good that people are doing that. They're losing sight of that these things are tools and tools are made to be used where they're appropriate. so we may start them out with you know four or five weeks of aerobics um and then in order to bring in a lot more carbohydrates we might move them to really high intense cardio where it's and prep their carbs up three or four having a lot of that off of the conditioning they're filling out they're feeling better the thyroid comes back online they get the periods back everything starts working really well and we've proven to them that carbs don't make you fat because this is one of the big misconceptions is that because people still think that carbs make you fat they don't want to eat them so when you want to put them back in their body they they said no no no this is everyone else is taking all the carbs out to get lean i can't have carbs carbs aren't the problem it's how your body's utilizing that and if i don't give you carbs early then by the time you get ready to get on stage how are you supposed to look good when the carbs aren't filling you out right so if i haven't given somebody carbs for months that they think that magically that last week if they just eat carbs they're going to make glycogen and that's not how it works your body gets to a point where it's not making glycogen effectively it's just burning through just burning through glucose and it's using too much glucose at rest instead of using fat and basically you're trying to at this point you're trying to nail a square block or a round hole. What we need to do is we got to get the carbs in earlier so your body can fill out effectively. And then we can feed you a hell of a lot more carbs during peak week. I've got some guys that eat 1,250 to 1,500 grams of carbohydrates three or four days before their show because they can utilize it and they fill up really nicely. You know, in my earlier career, part of my career, when we were still thinking that low carbs were the thing, you get to peak week, you give them carbohydrates and they'd sweat a lot but they wouldn't fill out and now we start looking into some of the signs and symptoms of relative energy deficiency syndrome we now understand that one of the problems when you've been eating like that for a long time is your body gets to a point where it can't turn glucose and the glycogen appropriately well how are you supposed to look on good on stage what makes your muscles look really nice and round when you get on stage sodium carbohydrate and water so again there's almost an adaptation of your body's now being eating low-carb for a while, just use fats, and now you're going, okay, now I'm going to give you a fuckload of carbs, and it's like, well, what the fuck do you want me to do with that? Absolutely. So what they end up doing, they end up shitloading, so they just start eating anything to try to build up intramuscular triglycerides and try to shove sodium in the cell, and sometimes that can work really well, but more often than not, you just look like bloated and watery and smooth, and you don't have the conditioning. You look massive, but your conditioning sucks, and realistically conditioning almost always will win over size if you have somebody that's really big but they're real smooth and you have somebody that's not quite as big but they're diced the person who's diced is typically going to win yeah no i agree with that just have to i've a few girls and you can always see that on on the stages it quite obvious they just look better because they lean they like they look more muscular Yeah And what ends up happening too is you get people that they trying to fill out before they get on stage and they can Well, then after the show, they go out and they have pizza and beer and all this, and they wake up and they look amazing. And they're like, well, I must need to eat pizza and beer before I get on stage. That's got to be the magic recipe for this. And it's like, hey, you go ahead and try that your next show. We'll see what happens. And then they just look terrible. Yeah, whether or not taking the scrap notes, probably the water and the sodium as well is going to be a bit of a factor. Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. Especially when you look at long term dieting, right? What controls the retention of sodium in the body? Aldosterone and also cortisol. Cortisol can attach to the middle quarter quarter receptor until your kidneys to retain that as well. If you got to the point where you've got long term dieting and you've been bathing yourself in cortisol, you're dysregulating aldosterone and cortisol. then you end up to the point where you're not holding any sodium you look really flat and the minute you give sodium the body goes oh shit sodium yay and it just holds on to it and then you can't get it off

CHAPTER 08

Post-Contest Training Volume and Recovery Metrics

and what do you do with in terms of training volumes or post-show training volume is that a case of say you know for example you you've gone up to say 30 sets per body part per week is it a case now the body's adapted the to that stimulus you need to continue with that or can you quite happily drop that back and still retain lean muscle tissue? I would, it depends. You know, everything depends on the state of the client. Like I have clients that they're so sick of training, that's the last thing they want, right? So at that point, it's like, okay, let's go to minimum effective volume and just go through the motions for a week. And then usually after that week, they're ready to roll, right? So it's mainly just, I want you to really relax after a show. There's no reason after you've just put yourself through six months of brutal training to get ready for this show. There's no reason to jump in to more brutal training. You probably need a break. So a lot of my clients, I'll tell them, don't even go to the fucking gym. Go do some fun shit. Go for long walks. Okay. And then go do some stuff. de-stressed, your body composition is not going to turn bad overnight like that. Then the second week, we'll start ramping it back up. It's going to be different on everybody. We have people that respond really well to 20 sets of workout and I've got guys that respond best to 50 sets of workout. You're really just training them long enough to understand where they need to be. I think it's that case of monitoring, tracking, all those sort of metrics It's coming to play a hell of a lot when it comes to that of going, okay, well, if you don't have the metrics, how can you justify change? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where all the metrics come in, right? I mean, we've seen the best results. If we can get them off the stage and get their HRV back to a good parasympathetic state, then they typically never put on fat post-contest. even eating what most people would consider a caloric load that should put a lot of fat on right but again like like i said we are guys when they go into a show they're usually eating way more than everyone else uh but we that's what we don't you don't see us putting a ton of people on on stage you see us putting people on stage when they've been screwed up by six or seven other trainers and then they come to us because they're sick of feeling like shit uh and they're sick of not placing and so we fix them up and then that you know they place top five like holy shit i've never placed top five and then then if they if they just continue on you know we can get them in the top three we can get them we can get them where they want to go as long as they trust in what we're doing and just do everything we say it's not that hard of a process it's just it just takes a lot of planning but that's that's on our end right so we sit around we do the planning we do the whiteboard sessions we figure out what they need to do over the next 12 months and then we pick the dates and then boom. So the way we do it, it's almost like military strategic planning, right? Like I know I've got a whole 12-month periodization for you. I know in every microcycle what's the theme of that microcycle and how does it play with all the other microcycles in this mesocycle? What's the theme of the mesocycle? And then those things all have to line up with the next mesocycle in line to then bring you to a point where now you've built a championship physique. And the problem is a lot of people don't want to go through that process. They want it right now because, you know, Coach Chick Jack on fucking Instagram says you can get ready in eight weeks, you know. And that probably has to do a lot with the reason they want to compete, right? Like they see somebody who's, you know, Insta-famous and they're like, I want to look like that and I want to look like that now. It's like, well, cool, but why? Like you know what your sort of determining factor of like do you actually want to compete or do you just want the fucking fame and money that this other person got Yeah And the thing is they all want it until they realize what it takes to get it And then you weed people out real quick with that. Like you find out really quickly who can go that far. Like I had a client. She wants to look like Dana Lynn Bailey. I'm like, okay, bro. We need a UK. Okay. Like, I don't think you understand what it's going to take to get there. Like that, that is a, that is going to be a chore. Like they'll look at like Hattie, look at Hattie. He's got a phenomenal, ridiculous physique. And these girls will come to say, I want to look like Hattie. I'm like, I don't think you get it. Like she tracks every little thing that goes in her mouth. She knows that she does everything 110%. Do you actually have the mindset to be able to achieve that? Because that's a one in a bazillion type of mindset to be able to do that. Yeah. And for how many years has she been sort of at the top of the game too? It's just like, absolutely. Like that takes some serious dedication and seriously wrapping your head around that process and, and also finding enjoyment in that process. And that's probably going back to how these, why like she had a, a powerful enough internal reason and of this is why I want to sort of do this. And she's, that's why she'd been able to be at the top of the game for X amount of years. Yeah, absolutely. And that's that, there's a championship mindset that you just very rarely find and that's why there's very few people that go to the top and stay at the top

CHAPTER 09

Nutrition for Athletic Performance and Cognition

how do you think about i guess going into performance and athletic performance what about nutrition for optimizing performance i mean even touching on people like haddie and even laura simpson and stuff they're incredibly great gifted athletes as well as competitors. They're super fucking strong as well. So what about nutrition for performance? Are carbs and carb timing important? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, carbs are go juice, right? But it also depends on what your sport is, right? So every man... certain power lifter like a power lifters desire needs to have carbs it's going to be slightly different than say like a an afl athlete right so in in one sport you're using that as a major source of fuel so if i'm dealing with a soccer player afl rugby if i'm dealing with somebody's got to play 90 minutes at a really high level constantly sprinting stopping jogging walking and they're going man um you need carbohydrates to a be able to survive the entire 90 minutes at a high level you also need it for cognition the minute you run out of uh run out of blood sugar your brain starts to shut down you start making mistakes you make judgment errors your fine motor skills start to go away you know so your speed starts to go away and there's there's plenty of research on this where you know they take two soccer groups and one of them goes in fully carb loaded the other one goes in at 50 and they've analyzed how how much time each um each group spent sprinting and how many meters that they actually covered and it's it's drastically um much better to be fully loaded with carbs and then to maintain those carbs throughout that entire game because if you don't your your your performance progressively goes down now if you look at something like a powerlifting where they're mainly staying in you know stored atp and creatine phosphate except for like training in their accessory work they don't have a huge need for carbs other than a you've got to fill in the calories somehow and b the carbohydrates serve to mechanically make you stronger so if i have more carbs on board that means i have more water that means my cells are more or filled out much better which means i have more leverage around my joints so there's still a need for carbs in strength sports where it might be a one rep type of thing but it might be a little bit different than what you're using with a long distance event like a triathlon or or field event where they're actually using a lot of those carbs to delay fatigue and improve cognition over time

CHAPTER 10

Keto as a Tool vs. Performance Disaster

i think like you know before we got on we were talking kind of about keto and things like that. I mean, I, I don't, I like keto. I've been doing keto on and off since I was 18 years old. I turned 42 next month. And so I consider myself pretty, pretty well first in all the various types of ketos because I've been doing it for, you know, 20, 20 something years. Um, but it's a, it's a tool, right? So if I'm a, if I'm just worried about physique and not performance, then a low carb diet works fantastic, right? If I need performance, is disastrous. If I went and did another Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu comp and I tried to do it low-carb, I would be done. You just can't. There's no way. And you can tell too when you go to a Jiu comp who well and who not because their performance match starts to get worse and worse and worse and they get gassed really early, whereas if you're well-conditioned and you have a lot of carbs on board, you don't get gassed as easily. You might have seven or eight matches all day, and your performance on match eight should be the same as match one if you're well-conditioned and prepared and if you're fully loaded with carbs. but a lot of these guys they want to get in the lower weight class so how do they do that they pull the carbs and the water out and then they try to put it back in while they're while they're competing and it just doesn't work whereas if you're smart you know your weight class fully carb loaded so then all you have to do is kind of maintain that over over the course of the event i tried to do keto and uh and jujitsu just to see what it would do and after two or three days of training, you go and you're all the guys that you're usually really good against about like about controlling them and submitting them and that type of thing. All of a sudden, they're just completely destroying you. And you realize I'm slower. I'm making I'm making mental mistakes. I'm not playing physical chess anymore. And then you learn really quick. OK, it's time for a carb load. So now you can you can get around some of this stuff. If you if you feel like you feel better on keto, some people might feel better. It might be a little bit more efficient for them to lose body fat. Just keeping in mind that if you need performance, then you might look at like a targeted keto approach or like a cyclical keto approach where, you know, once you feel like you've drained all of your glycogen, it's time for a carb up and then re-drain it and then carb up. And that's how you kind of get around making keto more for performance is you definitely need those carb load days or at the very least carbs before, during, and after you train. yeah that will give me my next question if you did like a tiger to keto could you do that on a daily basis and your pre-workout meal would be just be carbs and the rest of the day essentially just protein fat yeah you could absolutely do that but you also have to think too like keto is a lot of the a lot of people will talk about keto when it's unrelated to exercise When you throw exercise in the game, that throws a lot of the information off, right? And then depending on if it's low-level VO2 max or high-level VO2 max exercise, everyone says that keto has to be low-carb. Well, in order to understand it, we have to dictate what low-carb means. If I'm training three hours and grappling a day, low-carb for me might be 300 grams. I could have 300 grams if I'm training three hours hard and still be in ketosis. And I make that statement to people, that's impossible. You have to do a 20-gram induction phase and no more than 50 grams of carbs a day. All right, go train hard for three hours. Go eat 300 grams of carbs. Measure your blood on a ketometer, and you'll see that you're still making 1 to 2 millimoles of ketones. They all say that it has to be a high-fat diet. That is not true. Like if you do a protein-sparing modified fast and let's say you eat 200 grams of protein a day, so you're eating much higher protein than let's say you can eat in keto and you don't eat any fat and any carbs, I guarantee you, you're going to see a lot of ketones on there, right? But that's kind of the ultimate thing to do is you've got to test things. If you don't test things, then you have no idea how you're responding to it. And I've done all this stuff, right? I've worn continuous blood glucose devices, and I've taken so many sticks on my fingers for blood that my fingertips were purple. I couldn't get blood anymore. I started considering sticking my toes. That's how you know you're serious about the testing is when you're considering sticking your toe to get blood out so you can measure it on your glucometer and your ketometer, right? But most of the information that people are getting is bad information from people who they've got – they read the literature, but they've never applied anything. and so they actually don't even understand what happens when you take a high level athlete and you try some of these things out and they're not doing any experimentation and that's what you have to do to truly understand this stuff

CHAPTER 11

Evidence-Based Coaching vs. Research Paper Obsession

yeah I guess it goes back to those subjective and objective measurements that you need both say that again you broke up a little bit I guess it goes back to those subjective and objective measurements or metrics that you need both of them you can't just go okay well I feel this way it's like cool what's your blood glucose levels actually look like Like what's the actual midway? Absolutely. And, um, you know, it's, uh, one of the graphs I have, you know, you look at these guys that call themselves evidence-based, right? And most of the guys who are evidence-based, especially the really young guys, they've not trained anyone. What they need to say is I'm research paper based and what they're, they're fucking paper champs, right? Um, evidence-based should be that. Yes. I look in the literature, but I also have tens of thousands of hours of actual under the bar training people, training myself.

CHAPTER 12

Energy Systems and Aerobic Foundation in Sports

how do you um think about conditioning structuring conditioning so we're looking at athletic performance do you look at from an energy system standpoint do you okay i've got to hit the lactic threshold air lactic like how do you think about that when you're setting up for it yeah so you so you've got to look at you got to look at it in different phases right so you know it depends what the sport is it depends on the needs of that sport right which is easy to look up in the literature and then you know then making some good judgment calls on what needs to be done first so for instance you can have someone who um is well conditioned but too anaerobically conditioned and not aerobically conditioned if i see this a lot especially with fighters where they can go for a long time but they're they're pushing themselves through they're exhausted they're not producing any power and then they feel horrible after their training when we look at we'll do like a cooper's test and some other things we can do a test and we find their vo2 maxes is not probably where it needs to be um we need to probably work on vo2 max and lactate threshold we need to be able to have them sustain a high level of conditioning and to be able to not just rely on the anaerobic side but also the aerobic side so when the aerobic reserve needs to be at a certain level the anaerobic reserve so that they can last all the rounds they need to while replicating continued punching power, kicking power, and things like that. So in that case, a lot of times we need to talk to a client that they need to go slower first. They need to rebuild that aerobic side of things because everything is built on that foundation of aerobics. So if you think about the saying in strength and conditioning is that strength is the mother of all qualities, right? So in order to build power and speed, reactive force, all that, you have to have a certain level of strength to then have everything on platform. So my contribution is aerobic is the mother quality of all conditioning. So you can be well but if you not well especially having a good aerobic base you can repeat that stuff often and you can recover from it well So we think about okay let create this really nice broad foundation of aerobic capacity And then from then now let work on your power endurance Let's work on the anaerobic side. If it's alactic, we understand too. If you think about an alactic sport, you look at fighting. Fighting is going to be massively alactic. You might have a one-two punch and then you back off a little bit. So you might have a two-second exchange. You kind of pace yourself, you back off a little bit, you might have five or six seconds before you go in again. So on paper that looks alactic, but if you repeat that over five minutes in a round, it becomes massively anaerobic, or massively lactic and massively aerobic as the round gets longer and as a 15 to 25 minute fight progresses, you get more and more dependent on that aerobic system, which is what a lot of people these days are told not to work on. So I feel it's a really good idea to create a good aerobic base okay then from there now shift everything into an anaerobic side whether that's lactic or alactic but pay respect to that aerobic side because that's what's supporting your anaerobic system and enabling you to recover between bouts of activity would it be possible to be able to i guess train all those different um energy systems in the same block or the same phase or would you recommend cool let's spend six to eight weeks aerobically and then let's transition? Or is it possible to do it all almost at once? Yeah, it depends on time, man. It depends on resources. How much time do you have? So it's probably, you can compartmentalize it and say, all right, here's what your metrics say. This is what your testing says. Maybe we work on six weeks of the aerobic side and then we start layering in some anaerobic stuff too. You can do that or you can just do it concurrently. The main thing is to think about this in dollars, right? Everybody understands money. I've got $100. How much of that am I going to invest in each thing that I need to work on? So I need to invest the bulk of it in the thing that's the worst. then any more more money on the skill specific uh and then on the anaerobics or whatever you need for whatever's dictated by your uh sport you spend a little bit more money on that and a little bit less on the other stuff but you still have to spend money on some of this stuff because you want to maintain that right um you see it all the time like if you watch like we watch a lot of ufc and you'll see someone who's very well conditioned. Maybe they don't punch that hard, but they can punch the same repeatedly and they never get tired, like the Diaz brothers. They never get tired. They're not really going to knock anybody out, but their game plan is to take punishment until they tire you out and then they try to get you on the ground, right? Then you look at somebody like a Conor McGregor who's a knockout artist. He does really well the first round. The second round you start seeing the mouth breathing. his hands are getting a little bit lower and they're not getting up fast enough by the third round he's completely shattered and he's just hanging on like somewhere somewhere in between that is kind of the key right if i can have endurance like nate diaz and if i can have the power and the reproducing that power over a long time like connor uh connor mcgregor i would have a really good uh a really good well-rounded combat athlete so it's like if they both had a kid together man that would be a hell of a hell of an mma guy i'd be kind of ugly kid but yeah that's kind of how you think about it and um you know there's a lot of testing like running a cooper's test and saying if we do a cooper's test we'll typically do a 12 minute test and what we want to track is what is the highest you can get your heart rate to so that's your maximal heart rate then we look at what's the average heart rate that you're actually able to sustain over that 12 minute period. When you divide the average heart rate by the maximal heart rate, that's going to give you a percentage. If it's low, then that means you're more anaerobically dominated in your energy system for your training. If it's high, then you're more aerobically. So if we think about a sweet spot being somewhere like the mid 80s, that would be a sweet spot where you can go on for a long time. So you got good aerobic fitness or endurance, but it's low enough to where you can maintain your power over the course of the sport that you're doing. If I move it too high on the aerobic side, I start losing power production at the expense of being able to go forever. If it's too low, I can produce a lot more power but I can't produce it often so I don't have the distance with it. So somewhere in the middle, if I can get them blended down, then that seems to be the best area for them to be if they want to perform at a high level for an extended period of time. So when we talk about high level sports and looking at I guess that variety of training different energy systems and different I guess looking at overall strength and condition when we talk about something like CrossFit So CrossFit obviously is very I guess sporadic in terms of their training and how they sort of structure it

CHAPTER 13

CrossFit: Community, Overtraining, and Rehab Nutrition

What are your thoughts on CrossFit as a whole? I mean, you know what, it's just like anything else. It depends on what box you go to, right? So it's just like this, man. If I go into fitness first and there's 20 trainers there, they're not all going to be good. Most of them are going to be pretty shit, to be honest. There's going to be one or two guys that are really keen, and then the other ones are just going to be terrible. Same thing with CrossFit. If you have somebody that only does CrossFit education, they're probably not going to be that good. If the guys that come to our courses or they go to Kilo Strength Society and they learn their programming, if they're seeking people outside and kind of blending that together, that's where you're going to find the best, most well-rounded CrossFit coaches, and they're typically going to have the most well-rounded CrossFit athletes. I think one thing that, like I said, there's a lot of good and bad. One of the things that I noticed with CrossFit is it tends to attract a lot of people that have addiction issues, and what I mean by that is they're addicted to exercise, right? So you get people, especially they think they're going to be the next championship CrossFit guy, and they'll train three hours a day, twice a day, and they don't realize that that's probably not all that necessary, that they need to really streamline and work on the stuff they're really bad at and even everything out and bring it up together. And they also tend to overtrain a lot or overexercise a lot, and they don't feed it, especially the women. they will train 6-7 hours a day and they're eating fuck all calories and they want to know why their performance sucks and why they keep getting injured and if you keep getting injured and you're dieting you need to really stop dieting and work on fixing yourself up even from our clinic perspective the majority of the athletes that come into our clinic we give them rehab modalities they've been to a chiropractor They're all diagnosed with the same issue. They've all given them roughly the same treatment plan. None of it's ever worked. So they come to us and they tell us, yeah, I've been to this person, this person, this person. They all basically told me the same thing. We put them on the table. We're like, we're going to tell you the same thing. Like your diagnosis is correct. All these rehab exercises are correct. So now we need to find out why the rehab stuff isn't working. And almost 9.9 times out of 10, they're dieting and not eating enough to support the rehab. and the minute we get them to double their calories, all of a sudden all their injuries magically go away and all of a sudden the rehab works, right? But when you're working on high-level athletes, nutrition is the hardest thing to get them to understand, especially when it comes down to weight class athletes. Weight class athletes, they know that to keep their weight down, they under-eat, but they under-eat way too much. rather than making it just that happy little medium under eat just enough make sure your TD is enough and you'll be absolutely fine they're scared to death to eat more because they think they're going to put on weight but most of them are eating so far below their TD EE that even if they doubled or tripled their calories they would still be in a deficit so we put them on higher calories they never gain weight but they get better but those are some of the issues I see with CrossFit but I like CrossFit as a whole I think if you don't have enough time and you get to it, you can find a really good CrossFit box. They're very efficient with what they do because they work really hard, really fast, and then they recover. Or that's how it should be done. When you kind of first walk into a CrossFit box, a lot of the CrossFit facilities I've gone to and kind of like joined in the workouts, you'll have a really nice concurrent model of a workout where the first 20 minutes, they'll say, okay, we're going to work up to your heaviest five reps on a squat. You've got 20 minutes to get there. Then the next 15 or 20 minutes might be like a really brutal Metcon. And usually now they're pretty well-rounded, and in the last 20 minutes, well, they'll practice gymnastics or they'll do some other conditioning or something else. So I've been really impressed in the last couple of years with some of the places I've gone to because it seems like they're really dialing in what they're doing, and it's making a lot more sense than it did 10 years ago. Is it, I guess, quite an efficient training modality to have the strength and the condition in the same workout? I guess you're not going to get the best of both worlds. You'll get somewhere in the middle. Is that right in thinking? Yeah, I think it depends what you're looking for. You'll have a lot of people talk about interference effects between strength training and conditioning and all that. I had some talks of me and Mike T Nelson and some other guys and when we start thinking about that interference effect is so such a low percentage it not really something people need to be worried about because people seem to think that if they go do an hour-long weightlifting session and then do 20 minutes of aerobics after it oh you just wasted your whole session realistically that's not true and it's probably not worth worrying too much about what I've noticed over the last 10 years is the majority of it comes to their food if they just feed for performance instead of focusing on feeding for fat loss or feeding for hypertrophy feed for performance that usually overrides a lot of this a lot of the things that people see and the thing is like most of the people that go to CrossFit they don't want to build slabs of muscle right there you look at most gen pop people they don't want to be dick skin lean they want to be unfat um they don't want to they don't want to bench press 200 kilos they just want to look be a little bit stronger so i think crossfit fills in a lot of that stuff where it's it's group training everybody's having a good time they've got their community they they've got their friends there they all do it together they've got support and i think that's what they do really well um something that that my wife zoe said to me once is that you know it looks like people go to people go to crossfit to get more fit but they stay because of the community and that's something that crossfit does really well is they've built this amazing community that you don't see in this industry anymore because everybody wants to be solo lone wolves and they're they're scared of opening up and building that yeah and i think one thing crossfit do really well as well is they everyone in there will train hard like they will build that mental capacity to go i'm here to actually work yeah yeah and then the only i mean the only downside of that is sometimes they you get caught up in the moment and you start trying to do things you're not qualified to do yet and train at a level you're not qualified to train and then you get injured but you know as long as you're at a really good um a really good facility with coaches that have been in the industry for a long time they're going to know to tell you to chill the fuck out is there anyone in the CrossFit world, I guess, companies that are doing it quite well, do you think, like programming quite well, and they really know their stuff? As far as CrossFit, you broke up a little bit there, so, yeah, you know what, I'd have to remember, because there's so many different names to these CrossFit places, I'd have to look up what the names are, I will tell you this, like, one of my mentorship students is one of the guys that kind of runs CrossFit Wanderlust in Bali. His name is Matt Bolton. Hold on a second. He actually just came and stayed here, him and his partner, and did like three days of intense mentorship. He does online mentorship swimming too. So a lot of the stuff they do there with their training is a little bit different because it tends to make more sense and it tends to flow a little bit better. So they've also opened up a thing called Macro Kitchen, which is pretty cool. They make pre-done meals, but they also, if you just go in there to eat, you can tell them what you want your macros to be, and they'll prepare your meal right then for exactly what macros you want. So his partner, Henim, does all of that. And he was here learning for three days, and all she did was sit at her computer and create meal plans and meals and all the meals that they're going to start eating and serving at Macro Kitchen. So if people are in Bali, I highly recommend they go by CrossFit Wanderlust and that they go by Macro Kitchen. Because a lot of the followers on this podcast are Australian, I think Aussies spend a lot of time in Bali anyway. So guys, please go there. Yeah. Man, I haven't eaten today because I'm intermittent fasting right now and it's well past my eating window. So when I was trying to remember Matt's name, his Instagram is Boltz. So I was like, Matt Boltz, Boltz, oh shit, shit, Boltz, Matt Boltz. Sorry, Matt.

CHAPTER 14

Luke's Personal Daily Routine and Biohacking

What does the first sort of hour of your day look like? How do you optimize mental, physical performance for the day ahead? Or do you not have anything? Bro, you understand I'm a real weirdo. So the first thing I do, I wake up, go into my kitchen, and I'm too lazy to actually make myself a coffee, so I pull down a thing of instant coffee and I put two tablespoons of instant coffee in my mouth, I put some water in there, I shake my head to disintegrate and I swallow it. And that's how I do it. That's like old school Mr. Bean. Yeah, that's what I do. And then, you know, normally it's like a little cuddle time with Zoe and the dogs.

CHAPTER 15

Memory, Learning Strategies, and Sleep

obviously you study a fair bit um on in terms of memory and returning information do you have any tips tricks tools that you use for that number one get plenty of sleep man that's that's the big one and that's the one that people people are willing to sacrifice their sleep to try to get ahead one of the big things is turning short term memory into long term memory and for that you need deep sleep I tell a lot of people, I had a buddy the other day because I've come up with some pretty crazy brain stacks over the years and I've gotten to the point where now that I prioritize sleep I don't need the brain stacks anymore so one thing I take pretty often is Thorne Research Neurochondria that tends to be really good for memory there's a product from the states which is qualia i was using that for a while but it's it's god awful expensive with the exchange rate and the shipping and all that so i don't use that anymore i basically i just use the neurochondria really and and the crazy amount of caffeine like i i drink enough caffeine to kill a small child and i will i do nicotine right i do the little many laws there's nicotine so when you do nicotine it serves a couple of purposes for me a it helps to suppress my appetite a little bit and b it stimulates memory and learning by stimulating acetylcholine receptors so but it's definitely it's not for everybody some people just really hate it i like it so i'll typically take you know a few of those a day and just sit around and study and the last thing is repetition the hardest part about learning is the initial building the initial foundational knowledge but once you can build that really wide it's very easy to layer new knowledge on top of that so like once i once i taught myself the basics of biochemistry and i knew that really well like drawing out glycolysis through krebs cycle through electron transport chain and also you know where fat enters that protein oxidation all that once i built a solid foundation of that then when you start looking at metabolic regulation through other means when you start looking at the excess metabolism portion, you read it one time and you remember it because you're so familiar with that information. Anatomy is not my thing. I hired a therapist to teach a lot of our anatomy stuff because he an anatomy wizard I know I like the normal personal trainer I know just enough anatomy to be dangerous And so now, but the foundation was big enough to where now that I'm really studying anatomy, once I see something, it clicks and it stays in there. So for a lot of people, you just have to understand that just like building a championship physique, building a championship level of knowledge just takes steady, obsessive work. and in repetition i guess you are yeah you're building those neural links over time just a little that compound effect interest every sort of single day yeah absolutely and there's uh there's a um a good book about it um a mind for numbers by barbara oakley um that's a really good book about like focus versus diffuse learning how to learn things that you're not really great at like I'm not good for I'm not good with numbers my wife Zoe is I'm more of a more of an English rhetoric type of person so when I'm learning new ways of math it's it's very difficult for me but the more I work on it the easier it gets to that and then start doing numbers in your head and things like that so I've actually gotten way better than I was my earlier times which is is really important for science because there's going to be a lot of calculations and things that go into learning a science, especially chemistry. Right. So important to know, but for a lot of people, just understanding that adults don't like to feel ignorant. Um, adults don't like being bad at something. So if you think back at when you were a kid and you first learned how to ride a bike, like, you know, your father and your mother, someone, someone had training wheels on your bike and that, that allowed you to figure out how to pedal and how to steer. Then eventually they had to take the training wheels off, and they pushed you, and you were really happy because you could get a few meters, and then you'd fall over and bust your knee up, you know. But when you're a kid, you don't understand what feeling humiliated is when you're that young. You just get back on the bike, and you keep trying again until you can... like to feel adequate but they don't like to feel ignorant um but if you really want to learn something you got to let go of that because if you if you like hold on to that stuff for a long time that's going to get in your way of actually truly learning something and you just need to go balls deep and just repetition and had just get an obsessive thirst for knowledge and then it then And man, learning gets great after that because you just want to know more and more and more, right? So you just get layers and layers of knowledge on top of each other.

CHAPTER 16

Favorite Training Modalities and Powerlifting History

With all your experience and knowledge and specifically in training, is there a particular modality that you enjoy most or that you've loved most over the years, whether that's GVT or 6-12-25 method or whatever it might be? Yeah. Oh, man, I fucking hate GVT. Yeah, it's boring as shit. it's like the prowler like you just love to hate the prowler the prowler is so effective but it sucks when you're doing it the same thing with gvt man if you want to bring a body part up quick if you just want it to grow you're not going to get strong on it um you just want a muscle to be bigger man you smash it with gvt and it gets really big really fast but like my favorite ways of training i love uh i love german body comp i think that's for general population that's probably one of the most perfect templates you can use and it's so versatile you could program a german body comp linear periodization alternating periodization you could put layer on anything you want to with it um escalating density training there's a lot of stuff you could do but i i'm if i'm writing my own workouts and i'm probably going to do something like an athletic gbc where you're doing some contrast training so i might go in and hit a heavy three or five rep max on a squat and then go to box jumps or hurdles or you know something that's athletic because because i'm the i'm the type of guy i need to do something heavy or and or fast in every single session so if i can come in and just do my my a1 a2 as like really fast explosive and heavy maybe throw weight releasers on there bands and chains that satisfies my need for that and then i can do that for 20 minutes and then the other 40 i don't mind doing a pump up bodybuilder bullshit that I know I need to do, but I don't like doing it, then I don't mind doing that shit after that. So that would probably be my favorite is that or like what I was doing when I was powerlifting, which is kind of a blend, kind of a template I created that blends west side types of conjugate training with Paula Quinn style of programming where, you know, I would come in and my ace that would be my indicator lift So that might be a maximal effort lift or it might be dynamic effort or it might be a repetition effort whichever whatever depends on what I need to get out of that training block And then my B1 B2 C1 C2 D1 D2 would all be standard like standard alternating periodization, where the accessory and the supplementary work, that's what I would really periodize block to block. And then my indicator list, I would change when they weren't getting any better right and i found that's that's what i used that i created when i was powerlifting in my mid-20s and that's what kind of that's what got me to a 333 kilo deadlift and a 318 squat so it always worked really well for me and then i still get that kind of that competition where i'm trying to beat the last thing i did with either moving something faster or lifting more weight on the bar but now i love that sort of training modality i'm very similar i think to you is that if i don't lift heavy i just i don't want to go in and work out yeah 100 now now that i'm now that i'm older though i am starting to get into like i haven't done true bodybuilding training a long time where i just do straight sets and just try to pump the fuck out of my chest and back and whatever and i did a session like that the other day and i was like man this feels pretty gnarly man maybe i should start doing more pop-up work um

CHAPTER 17

Influences and the Future of Muscle Nerds

who's the who's your biggest inspiration you think throughout your life who's somebody that really inspired you to to keep wanting to be better to grow to get smarter to be the best version of yourself you know you know it's gonna it's gonna be a it's it's a few people man like obviously to pay tribute to charles uh charles poliquin was my first if you could call it first love in a in the thing because that's when when testosterone magazine came out online back when it was like what was the testosterone.net i mean this is back in shit this is back in like 1998 and uh you know i was learning from all these people like charles staley was putting out articles paul check was putting out articles charles poliquin charles's stuff resonated more with me being like you know like naturally his training really resonated sort of doing his stuff like fantastically well no matter what I did no matter what system I used that he was promoting it all worked really well and so um I kind of grabbed on that that was in the early stages of my career my biggest inspiration of learning how to how to write training programs and things like that and then then i got into kind of uh you know the last few years meeting dr james laval he became a big inspiration and made me really want to understand the chemistry side of things um and then like dr brian walsh who's a good friend of mine he makes me want like he's like one of the best dudes in the world and like trying to be more like brian and just do my thing and do it well and then and lately I've been doing a graduate diploma in performance nutrition. And like, Lauren Bannock at the Institute of Performance Nutrition, like he's a big inspiration for me now because he's in the lab and he's doing all this stuff and he's training these high level athletes and he's, he's creating all this really cool educational stuff and opening doors for people who are going a non-traditional route of education, right? Where, you know, maybe you don't want to do a four-year degree in dietetics or a four-year degree in nutrition well you can do these other things that basically slim down just to the stuff you actually need to know and just only concentrate on performance nutrition because uh like if i was still in the united states if i wanted to get a degree in this stuff um i would have to take all these bullshit classes that has nothing to do with what i want to do right and and like i'd have to take United States history and I'd have to take all this other bullshit and it's like what I don't need to know United States history to write people's fucking performance nutrition so you know there's guys like him that are making opening up doors for people to be able to jump into a graduate level university class and actually get proper credentials without having to go through the bullshit of a normal bachelor degree and learning shit that you don't need to know right so that's a big inspiration for me too and that their program is is hard as hell um but it is well designed like the information i'm learning there you know the the initial part of it was a lot of stuff i already knew but filling in a lot of gaps and now it's progressively rolling into holy shit this is crazy so i can't recommend their stuff uh enough if you if someone has the time and the money to to go for a post graduate degree, it's fantastic. And do you think that's going to influence the next phase of your own programming within Muscle Nerds Yeah I think I think because I would love to get to a point where the muscle nerds was autonomous I have an incredible staff and they just keep getting better I'd love to get to the point where we expand a little bit more and then I can kind of step back a little bit and start mainly doing more of the running of the business instead of working in the business and then do what I like to do, which is research and development, creation, things like that. And I'd love to start working with more high, high-level performance athletes, like high-level MMA guys, high-level sports. And they kind of just have five or six of those on the side. So in order to do that, I really need the credentials. So that's why I decided to jump into the graduate program, so that I could go ahead and get that legitimacy, right? Because the stuff that I've done and the stuff that I have, it's not high level enough to dictate like getting a boxer, you know, that makes $50 million like a Mayweather, you know, that type of thing, right? And that's the kind of stuff I want to do because I want to be able to, in the second half of my career, I want to be able to have a little bit more fun and kind of raise the bar a little bit and show what we can do on a bigger scale. That'll be cool. that's going to be really cool to see your journey and get because i've no doubt you're going to get to that level it's a matter of time right um it'd be great to see someone like you get there and and essentially be able to change the game and sort of program people correctly i think we we shared a bit of a post uh it was a little braun james doing a squat and i found like a bit of a giggle over and i was just like how the fuck could this even be allowed it was pathetic that that was mind-blowing i could not believe that um but hey look it is what it is um a lot of the things with um becoming a a coach for that type of athlete has nothing to do with what you know it's it's about who you know and a lot of these a lot of these celebrities and a lot of these um these uh high level sports athletes they end up getting trained by somebody that knows somebody that they know it has they have but their knowledge is yeah no i am uh it's crazy to see i mean the um the sort of the future for me is to go into the acting industry and when i see sort of transformations through you know like the rock and henry cavill and all these sort of guys uh like henry cavill did the crazy thing for which like dehydrate the fuck out of himself i'm like did you need to do that yeah yeah like it sounds great but one of the hardest things about the um about the acting industry is that they just they more often than not don't have a lot of time they find out they get a role they find out they're going to be shooting in three months i need you to look a certain way so then they have to do crazy things because they just simply don't have enough time because they don't have enough notice yeah i guess that's where the difficulty comes in that you should almost always stay i guess as you would with anything competing a comp or a photo shoot if you always stay three four weeks out wherever it might be then you don't have to be so drastic yeah yeah i mean if you've got if you know you're going to get a part you've got a year to prep that's a good optimal way of doing it but practically you know they might have six weeks before they have to look a certain way and they might have just gotten off a movie where they had to look one way and now they got to look the extreme of the other. Like, who is it? Christian Bale. When he was doing like, he did like Batman and he's like doing the, what is it, the machinist. And he's got to, you know, he's got to look two completely crazy different ways with not a lot of time to do it. It's just insanity. But that's Hollywood, isn't it? Yeah. That's where you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do. Yeah, right.

CHAPTER 18

Book Recommendations and Stoic Philosophy

Is there any specific books that you recommend people reading, whether that's in the health and fitness industry, whether it's, I know you're into some fantasy reading, things like that. Is there a couple of books that you're like, that's something that everyone needs to read? I think that Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, that if you like fantasy, like I'm big in the, like I love sci-fi, I love fantasy. I think that it's like a, it's philosophy, but it's in a fantasy story kind of story building type thing and it's fantastic and it's basically all about giving you permission to take care of yourself before you take care of others that it's good to be generous it's good to be compassionate it's good to be that philanthropy but don't do it at the sake of setting yourself on fire to help other people and so because that's what i i spent too many years doing that i i had a problem saying no to people and then it just it basically just it wore me out to the point where I just I can't be there for everybody so I had to learn how to say no and stop being so altruistic

CHAPTER 19

Upcoming Events and Closing Remarks

i want to be super respectful your time mate but what's next for um what's next for mosslanders what's on the 2020 agenda uh i get married in a couple weeks oh congrats yeah thanks we got that going on and in march i'm heading back to the states to texas to do our program design course uh got the netherlands in june i'll be back in texas in october i'll be speaking a swiss in october if uh you know i think people always ask me what they should you know if they're going to budget for their education what should they budget for and of course I'm going to say go to my courses but I always tell people look, find the courses that resonate the best, it's going to make you the best return on investment and the ones that line up with your clients like if you don't have any powerlifting clients, don't fucking go to a powerlifting seminar, go to something that's going to be better to teach your clients how to move for them right? So when you look at your budget I think people should always go to one big symposium, at least one big symposium every year and then spend the rest of their money on the courses they want to do and mix it up between some online and in-person stuff swiss in canada is one of the big symposiums i highly recommend comes out every other year and it is probably the best symposium i ever been to and everybody in most everybody in europe and north america they all there man um you know so christian this year christian tibideau is going to be there i be speaking paul check usually speaks bill casmeyer is there matt winning is there like uh fuck i think paul carter's speaking at it this year john meadow speaks at it eric serrano like where where can you go and have all of those dudes in one fucking hotel all talking and getting drunk and hanging out like you can't you can you'll never find that anywhere except at swiss and this year in october they're having it is it would it be easily i guess understandable for like a moron like me be able to go and okay is the information actually absorbable is it am i going to look at the stage and go, I should not be here. No, no, no. Because most of the people, all of the people who lecture there are pretty experienced lecturers. They know at what level they need to teach at. So it's not like, man, I go to these medical conferences sometimes and within five minutes I'm sitting here thinking, I have no idea what this guy is doing. Because it's so far from my current – I'm just sitting the whole time laughing like, man, I feel like I'm a big retard right now. I have no idea what these people are talking about. Swiss is not like that at all. They tend to get it at just the right level. And then they have a few different types of – they have a few rooms. They have a nutrition room, a rehab room, a training room. So you just kind of determine what you're going there for. And you find out – you look at which speaker you want to hear. and you just kind of fill out your whole schedule of what you want to do and who you want to see and that type of thing. I think it's fucking fantastic. I'm glad Ken brought that back in 2015 because it's a lot of work for him, but shit, man, it does such a good job at getting everybody together and raising the bar of knowledge of what we should all be focusing on. and I guess lastly where can people find you what's the best contacts to reach out to you guys for any queries questions for your education yeah so like correspondence is always best through email so info at muscle nerds dot net Dale is in the office you usually hear from her she's fantastic you know we do we've got our Instagram everybody's got an Instagram these days so it's muscle nerds underscore health if you want to be friends with me on Instagram that's cool just understand that all I post on there are dogs and jujitsu and really horrible off color jokes so if you've got a good sense of humor you'll probably like that but I don't do much online with that stuff anymore we got on Facebook we got Muscle Nerds on Facebook so you can find us there And then our website our new website about to drop so that's exciting. So we've been working on, we had a really rubbish website, we've been working on it for over a year now, so it's going to drop and it's going to be fantastic, right? And when does that drop? Can you say that? I'm hoping in the next two weeks it'll be online, yeah. Cool. and then we've got new portals we're working on for education to raise the bar with the education stuff we're doing. With our program design, it started out at eight weeks. Then we went to 10 weeks. Now it's coming out to be something like 12 weeks. We've added in sales and marketing. We hired a sales and marketing expert to write some content so that the guys can figure out, now that you know how to program correctly, how do I leverage it and make more money? That way you have both that. I'm helping my clients, but I need to also get paid when I'm worth type of thing. So, I mean, that program has been crazy for us because we wanted to do something no one else is doing. So with our program design, we teach you all the ins and outs of exercise metabolism. It's not just sets, reps, time, and attention. We talk about the psychology of things. We talk about assessments and treatment stuff. Like you go through it multiple times. You don't just go through it once. You go through it three or four times on the online content, and then we have an in-person seminar you come to as well, and you can come to that a few times as well. Because we want people to come to the seminars and actually learn how to do things correctly. We don't want people to just pay us, show up, not pay attention, and go home and just get a certification and say, oh, yeah, I attended this. No, the points for you to come learn how to do shouldn't be a better coach, not just to be there, right? So that type of thing is really important for us. So we've come up with some ways of doing things that require a hell of a lot more work than other certifications in the industry. And I think that's what definitely sets you guys apart of going that extra mile and actually giving a shit about people's knowledge and education and knowing that the better they are, the better their clients are going to be. And we can, one at a time, make the world a bit of a better, healthier place. Absolutely. I mean, look, knowledge is power. the more of us that get on the same kind of uh the same kind of vibe on how things should be done the faster we change the industry and stop screwing people up i guess that raises the bar even more to the i guess the potential of humankind as a whole 100 100 man gotta do everything we gotta do things the ethical way and do it the right way and stop being so money centric and be more client centric and do what's right for them not for us man i think that's a perfect note to finish this podcast on. Guys, Luke and Muscle Nose will all be linked in the show notes. So if you want to check them out, please reach out there. Luke, I just want to thank you again for taking all the time to chat with me today. All right, my brother. Thanks for having me on. You're welcome, man.

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# #09 Luke Leaman - Competition prep, Athletic Performance, Crossfit and more

**Channel:** The Abi Khan Show
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://api.riverside.fm/hosting-analytics/media/70d7caf5de14a2a0f4ad3cfd480155fff51c8e8d3ef0cf2f2095796ed68ef220/eyJlcGlzb2RlSWQiOiIzZDU2YjU3My1iYmIzLTRiODgtYWZjNC03NmY0YzMwZDg2NWMiLCJwb2RjYXN0SWQiOiI3MmNiMmRmOC05YzBkLTRjZDgtYTlmNS0wYmFlNzdjYzZkYWEiLCJhY2NvdW50SWQiOiI2OTI1NDMwZjgwMjM4NTBjNTg5OThiYjMiLCJwYXRoIjoibWVkaWEvaW1wb3J0cy9wb2RjYXN0cy83MmNiMmRmOC05YzBkLTRjZDgtYTlmNS0wYmFlNzdjYzZkYWEvZXBpc29kZXMvM2Q1NmI1NzMtYmJiMy00Yjg4LWFmYzQtNzZmNGMzMGQ4NjVjLzQ0NDA5MDI2LTQ0MTAwLTItNWJmY2Q1ODNmYWYxZi5tNGEifQ==.m4a

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's episode of the Abbey Can Show. I've got such an exciting episode for you guys. Your mind's going to be absolutely fucking blown. I do apologize for a couple of little circumstances where the signal went a little bit, but 99% of it is absolutely great and you'll still get the gist of it. So today's podcast is with somebody who's really making a positive influence to the health and fitness industry as a whole. It's someone that's really pioneering a new way of thinking, a new modality of wanting to improve the health, well-being and lives of people genuinely. And genuinely is a term that I'm using very, very passionately in this circumstance because Luke and Zoe and the team at Muscle Nerds are really putting their health back into health and fitness, which is something that I've been an admirer of and something that I do preach and practice with my own training. at my own clients as well. So you're going to love this podcast with Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the latest episode of the Abbey Can Show. Today's guest is someone I've been looking forward to talking to for a hell of a long time and is someone that's definitely influenced the way I train my own clients and the sort of progress in my own health and fitness career. So we have from Muscle Nerds, Mr. Luke Lehman. Luke, Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Hello, hello. Man, we've been trying to get this together for months, so I'm glad we could finally get on here and have a little chit-chat. Yeah, I can't wait for it. I think the people are going to get a hell of a lot of value. So for the people that don't know who you are in this health and fitness world, which is absolutely insane to me, because you guys are without doubt the sort of pinnacle of knowledge in the health and fitness game, can you just give a really brief intro of who Muscle Nerds are? Yeah, man. I mean, you know what? that's something we've been working with our marketing department to figure out what we actually are because so and we uh we primarily train in stuff that's going to be you know a bit more advanced and in depth than what they're going to learn in like a cert 3-4 or whatever minimal type of things they have to get to start training so you know we we teach a lot of the science science stuff and the why of why you're doing what you're doing so why would you do certain set rep time attention why would you program one way why would you write a diet like one way so we go into the the biochemistry of things and the physiology and we try to get we try to get trainers interested in learning the science part right because one of the things it says you know it's a low barrier to entry career but basically anybody can do it if you just pay for it do your homework but you don't get enough information when you get that base cert that base certification they don't teach you in depth of the actual whys and how things are working. And we believe that that's really important to understand, to understand where you're going with a program. Like if I give you certain things to do, I should be able to predict the outcome of that. And then we should be able to repeat that and have every phase building on each other for 12 months or four year training cycle or whatever it should be. So we do that. We do have online training. We mainly, again, train other coaches. So we do that type of thing, consultations. And yeah, that's the gist of it. Basically an education company that also offers online training. And we've also got a clinic here in Brisbane where people can come and get out of pain if they're in pain and learn how to move better. Wicked. And I think just touching on that, obviously with a lot of the educational knowledge that you guys do, I think it'd be a really good segue into the first sort of topic. A lot of people that are listening are bikini athletes, physique athletes, things like that. So how do you guys sort of think about prepping people for, I guess, comp, for stage? Yeah, so, you know, that's, man, that's a big subject, right? So you've got a lot of people that it's all over the place. So you've got like kind of traditional way of bodybuilding and then you've got the more the research base and you got people to kind of blend everything in. And we like to kind of blend everything in. And I'm old school, man. Like when I first started bodybuilding and I got into this, it was 30 years ago. So when I started lifting weights and really training hard, and it was one of those things where back then people weren't so keen for instant gratification. Nowadays, somebody can come to you and say, hey, I just went to a bodybuilding show. I'd like to get on stage in 12 weeks. And you look at them and you're like, bro, you've never lifted weights in your life. You're like 38% body fat. You need a few years of building that physique. If you want a world-class physique, it takes a long time. And that's what people seem to not understand these days. And so kind of where we are is if you come to us to be trained for a show, you don't get to pick your show. We will pick your show. We'll tell you when you're ready. We'll tell you how long it's probably going to take. And the reason we do it like this the reason we like to play the long game is we don want to screw anybody up Despite what people think bodybuilding is not a healthy endeavor right There's no such thing as a healthy competition. It doesn't matter if you're a professional chess player or a bodybuilder or a CrossFit athlete. None of this stuff is inherently healthy. So what we want to do is try to make it as healthy as possible and then get unhealthy when it's time to get unhealthy, which is those last few weeks when you're getting ridiculously lean. So the way we kind of structure things is we work a lot on building up your work capacity, building up your food, building up – like really unclogging your biochemistry so that you're using food the way you should be using it. That way we don't have to starve you going into a show because, I mean, as we know, calories in versus calories out, it is as simple as that to get lean. if you just lift weights and create an anabolic response with the weights you do your conditioning you do your dieting it's very easy to get super lean um but if you only look at calories and calories out you don't understand all the little nuances of what calories out actually means like understanding mitochondria how the mitochondria work how the bioenergetics of things work how nutrition truly works what ends up happening is you just starve yourself you get on stage and then post-contest, you blow up. If you wash, rinse, and repeat this often enough, you get to a point where it's getting massively harder to lose weight and it's getting much easier to put it on. We get people all the time that they're doing too many shows a year, they're staying lean. Once you get lean, if you're a man and you've gotten down to 5% body fat, anything over that seems fat to you, even when you're leaner than 99.9% of the population. You get addicted to being that lean when you try to hold that for a long time your body's going to push back by forcing you to uh to gain weight by altering your satiety signals and your hunger all your hunger signals and then and it's slowing down your metabolism to accommodate not eating enough there's a lot of there's a lot of negative effects that people aren't talking enough about and we get girls all the time they'll do four five four five six shows putting on why they can't get it off despite eating you know 900 calories a day and training 21 hours a week and at that point we have to figure out how to pull them out of this if people would just start start really concentrating on one or two shows a year really have a nice off season make sure that they're doing things correctly building up how many calories they can handle so they don't have to die and starve themselves getting their work capacity up if they just took care of a lot of this uh internal machinery and did that up front we wouldn't have such an epidemic of people blowing up losing their periods having their hair fall out um you know guys having to put get on testosterone therapy because they can't make testosterone anymore that there's all these these issues that are happening because people want it too quickly and they don't want to work uh for a long time for it yeah i think as you said there that instant gratification with the rise of obviously social media like we want to have abs tomorrow and a great ass tomorrow and where we're going to suffer to fucking hell and back just to get there without thinking cool well where are you going to be in 12 months by doing that yeah 100 and you know you can you can you can get you can get stage really ready really fast or you can do it correctly and those two things are not normally not synonymous with each other right there's a base foundational level you need to be at before you decide to do a show and we get people all the time they come in and they're not even lean enough to start getting ready for a show and they pick a show in 12 weeks, then they, they, they can do it. But then it's the repercussions that come after it. Right. So like what we feel, we feel you're ready to start a show when you almost look like you could get on stage or what the average gen pop person would look at you and be like, Oh, are you competing this weekend? And you're like, no, I'm competing in like 16, 20 weeks, you know, cause that's really what it takes, especially nowadays where if you get on stage, you don't have glute striations. You're not even a top five. Right. When I, when I started bodybuilding, it wasn't like that. You know, you just need to be really, really lean. Now you've got to be completely diced in order to win. And some people are, they're, they're a bit delusional about how much muscle mass they have and how much fat mass. Most people are a lot fatter than they think. Um, I've had guys come to me and say, you know, I'm 95 kilos. I think if I lose five kilos, I'll be shredded. I'm like, nah, bro, you're going to have to lose 25 kilos to be like really shredded. And they don't believe me until the first 10 K comes off and they're like, wow, I'm still really soft. Yeah, I told you it's going to take another 15K. They get down to 71 kilos and they're like, oh man, I'm finally shredded shit. I'm like, yeah. Everyone's fatter than they think. What's that? No, you go. I just think that there's not enough people being honest with the general population. Our industry's gotten too much about being money-centric and not enough about being client centric. And when you're focused too much on money and training a bunch of people and you're not giving enough detail and attention to other clients you kind of your philosophy around things starts to move away from doing the right thing and instead turns to becoming an influencer and trying to make all this money and you start doing the wrong thing. So it's very difficult to get massively popular when you do the right things. It's easier to do that when you're doing all the bullshit and you don't care about your clients. Yeah, and I think it's what you said before, you need to know the why behind what you're doing. So for anyone out there who has hired a coach, ask them why. Like, it's quite funny to sort of hear people try to come up with an answer when you go, okay, well, why am I doing this? And you know yourself, like often the answer is just completely just fluff and it doesn't even really make any sense. Well, I remember years ago, I'm talking probably eight years ago, when I was lecturing, I realized that probably the best answer for everything is it depends, right? And so I started saying that, but then I would talk about all the things it depends on. Now it depends seems to be the answer that most people give, but then they don't give any clarity because what they're using it depends as a shield because they don't actually know. So they go, well, that depends on a lot of factors. And then they kind of move on and they don't clarify what they mean by that. So if you're asking your coach why you're doing things and what would work best and if they say it depends or whatever and they can't clarify all the things it depends on, then they're probably full of shit. yeah and I think that your client has way more respect for you if you just say I'm honestly not sure but let me do a little bit of research the amount of times that I've said that I'm not going to go out there and say hey look yeah I'm just going to give you a bullshit answer because if that person's actually got you know a thought in their head they'll go and research it themselves and come back to me and say you were fucking wrong yeah yeah you just pulled that out of your ass yeah that's the thing like when we lecture my staff and myself that's we it's very often we tell people i don't know but i'll try to find out for you like you can't possibly know everything and you know sometimes you'll get crazy questions that come out of left field that the people you can never figure out the answer it's best to just go and they doubt and come back to them they respect it a lot more yeah no absolutely so when we're looking at the comp prep When people are coming out of that, what are some protocols that people need to be thinking about? In terms of let's go nutrition first, do they need to go straight to their new maintenance? Is it more of a reverse diet protocol? What are your recommendations on that? Yeah, you know what? I'm not a big fan of reverse dieting. The way I see it is this guy's dieted down. Let's take a natural athlete. It's not uncommon for a natural athlete to take 24 weeks to diet down for a show, or they should, right? because the slower you can do it, the more likely you're going to retain lean tissue. And if they don't have anabolic drugs on their side, then they can't really rush it like somebody who's enhanced. So if you ask them to reverse diet out, you're just delaying the inevitable. You might as well focus on let's look at the maintenance and maybe give them like a 10% to 15% off the maintenance, right? And I found that that works a lot better. Um, if, if I will use reverse dieting, if I have someone where maybe they're at some point there was an eating disorder or disordered eating involved, or I tell them, you know, if they're sitting at, you know, 1500 calories, I'm going to take up to 2400. If they look like they're about to hyperventilate and they've got tachycardia, I'm like, all right, all right, let's just try 300 calories. And we just keep trying to raise that as much as we can to get them back up. And one of the reasons why is if you look at, if you look at total daily energy expenditure, and a lot of these bodybuilders, they'll take their energy intake well below their BMR. And once you start doing that, that's when the body says, hey, I don't need to have strong erections. I don't need to have a menstrual cycle. I don't need to make pretty hair, skin, and nails. I don't need to create a lot of body temperature because it starts getting rid of all the things that you don't need to survive and it moves into kind of a survival state where it's only funneling fuel and the things that are keeping you alive. So you've got this massive wiggle room. If we assume that a typical sedentary person, that that BMR could be anywhere from 60% to 70%, and then we layer on top of that non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, thermic effect of food, and then adaptive thermogenesis, whether that's from regulating body heat or maybe that's from exercise, you've got a good 30% to 40% spread there where if you're already dieting at like 40% of your calories or more if you're getting ready for a show, you can probably add a lot of that back and that'll up-regulate thermic effect of food. The minute you eat food, you're going to lose some of that because you're going to burn some calories to process that. You're going to start burning more energy when you train so your adaptive thermogenesis and exercise thermogenesis will go up. And then you going to start moving more naturally subconsciously through NEAT So a lot of that stuff you can actually kind of wipe out because you fueling stuff that is now deregulated You immediately push it back up once you start eating more. So I would rather just give them that. And if they gain a little weight, who cares, right? You're not going to be able to stay that lean forever anyway. So if you go from 5% to 12% body fat after a show, who gives a shit? You're still leaner than the majority of the population. you just at this point think you're obese fat and you're not you're because bodybuilders tend to be delusional if if they can't see a vein in their fucking uh navel but uh i i would rather just pump it up say okay let's let's focus on how much you're training let's focus on your estimated rmr let's focus on some of these other things and let's pump you up to maintenance and then maybe maybe we go to maintenance and pull off about 10 to 15 to 20 percent off the top of that so that i can prove to you you're not actually going to get fat. And then we can play around with some macros, right? You know, the least likely macro to be turned into fat is protein. So what we might do post-show in order to get more calories, then we might pump the protein up to really high levels. Okay, that way we kick up thermic effect of food. We've got a macronutrient that, yes, it can be turned into carbs and that can be turned into fat. But by the time it gets down to the fat level, there's not really that many calories left. So you're safe as pumping that up, right? If you're really lean, most likely if you've done things right, you're probably still really insulin sensitive. So it makes sense to pump the carbs up too and maybe keep the fat a little lower, right? On the low side and then slowly get the fat up at some point. But it's hard for, it's really hard for me to answer this because we set so many things up really well before they compete that we never have clients blow up. But our clients are always eating two to three times more than anybody else at the show because we don't believe in starving them. We plan on building work capacity high, building up the calories. So by the time they get on stage, you know, they're destroying carbs. I've got girls eating 750 to 900 grams of carbs a day because they're burning through it so quickly by the way we set up their biochemistry going into the show and they're very well conditioned. And I guess that's why their preps take so much longer because of that, because you're preparing them for, I guess, the competition. So you're going to go in that at your peak rather than being absolutely depleted, feeling like shit. I mean, imagine playing in the Super Bowl when you feel like absolute death. Like, it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And the thing is, you know, if we set this up correctly and they're already eating a lot of calories, they're less likely to binge after the show because they're tired of eating. And that's one of the first clients I ever put through this type of format that we use. After he got off stage, he texted us and he goes, hey man, can I start dieting now? Because I'm really fucking sick of eating. Because he was eating like 3,500 to 4,000 calories. The guy was only like 60 something kilos in body weight. But what we did, we set him up to where we got that kind of metabolic machinery working so hard that he needed a shit ton of calories even just to keep his weight up jeez that's impressive that's fucking impressive so what do you do with i guess cardio so would you generally have that relatively high going up into the into the show and do you back it off slowly or is it more of a call we're taking you from an hour a day to 30 minutes a day or something well so first we have to like what are we talking about cardio? Are we talking about aerobics? Are we talking about high-level cardiovascular respiratory training? You've got a way of thinking about, are we talking about sub-VO2 max, which is sub-70%, or are we talking about over that? Everything's a tool. What we prefer to do is we front-load the program with aerobics. Whereas most people will put the aerobics at the end because they're chasing calories. We'll put it at the front because I'm chasing adaptation. I want you building more mitochondria. I want the mitochondria to be working more effectively. I want you to have a massive amount of oxidation going on, which takes oxygen, which means we need aerobic work. So we might do two big blocks of aerobic training, get all that taken care of, and that might be the first, say, six to eight weeks of their training. Then we're going to drop that off, right? And we're not going to really use it. We might use a little bit like maybe some Tabata as a reverse by something that's kind of on that aerobic anaerobic threshold. We might leave that in there a couple of days a week because you don't need a lot of it to maintain your aerobic state. Then we move in more into just weightlifting, right? Because without the muscle, you know, you can be as lean as you want, but if you don't have the muscle, you're not going to be able to show it on stage. You're not going to look good. So kind of like the middle of that building season will be almost all weightlifting. and then as we get close to beginning contest prep we might start

slowly adding a little bit more conditioning at that point so that we can keep the food high. But we're mainly using the aerobic work initially to create adaptations to get someone oxidizing better so they can eat more food and they perform better, they're training harder, they're recovering harder. Then we might throw in more aerobics at the very end so we can keep the calories high. But then it also depends on how much time they have. if you're a very busy executive and you just like to bodybuild if you're like a weekend bodybuilder and you don't have a lot of time then we have to figure out what's most important and at that point eating lower amounts of food is probably going to be better because that doesn't take up a lot of time but if you're another coach and you've got all the time in the world you might be doing a tremendous amount of work going into your show because you've got the time for that and that will enable you to eat far more calories than if we didn't have that in. Then we can also modulate, you know, what is the VO2 max I'm looking for? So often I get people, girls, especially girls, they'll come in and they'll do consults with us and they're a few months out from their show and they decided to stop with another coach because they already lost their period and their hair was falling out and they didn't feel normal. And they're like, I don't, if this is the way I'm going to feel, I don't want to compete. I'm like, well, you're probably going to feel like that at least the last three weeks, but you shouldn't feel like that three months out, right? So what we might do with them is kind of the same process of building up the aerobic base. Then a lot of these girls are eating no carbs because that tends to be the thing now is hashtag fuck cardio and like hashtag fuck carbs, which both of those statements are completely – it's not good that people are doing that. They're losing sight of that these things are tools and tools are made to be used where they're appropriate. so we may start them out with you know four or five weeks of aerobics um and then in order to bring in a lot more carbohydrates we might move them to really high intense cardio where it's and prep their carbs up three or four having a lot of that off of the conditioning they're filling out they're feeling better the thyroid comes back online they get the periods back everything starts working really well and we've proven to them that carbs don't make you fat because this is one of the big misconceptions is that because people still think that carbs make you fat they don't want to eat them so when you want to put them back in their body they they said no no no this is everyone else is taking all the carbs out to get lean i can't have carbs carbs aren't the problem it's how your body's utilizing that and if i don't give you carbs early then by the time you get ready to get on stage how are you supposed to look good when the carbs aren't filling you out right so if i haven't given somebody carbs for months that they think that magically that last week if they just eat carbs they're going to make glycogen and that's not how it works your body gets to a point where it's not making glycogen effectively it's just burning through just burning through glucose and it's using too much glucose at rest instead of using fat and basically you're trying to at this point you're trying to nail a square block or a round hole. What we need to do is we got to get the carbs in earlier so your body can fill out effectively. And then we can feed you a hell of a lot more carbs during peak week. I've got some guys that eat 1,250 to 1,500 grams of carbohydrates three or four days before their show because they can utilize it and they fill up really nicely. You know, in my earlier career, part of my career, when we were still thinking that low carbs were the thing, you get to peak week, you give them carbohydrates and they'd sweat a lot but they wouldn't fill out and now we start looking into some of the signs and symptoms of relative energy deficiency syndrome we now understand that one of the problems when you've been eating like that for a long time is your body gets to a point where it can't turn glucose and the glycogen appropriately well how are you supposed to look on good on stage what makes your muscles look really nice and round when you get on stage sodium carbohydrate and water so again there's almost an adaptation of your body's now being eating low-carb for a while, just use fats, and now you're going, okay, now I'm going to give you a fuckload of carbs, and it's like, well, what the fuck do you want me to do with that? Absolutely. So what they end up doing, they end up shitloading, so they just start eating anything to try to build up intramuscular triglycerides and try to shove sodium in the cell, and sometimes that can work really well, but more often than not, you just look like bloated and watery and smooth, and you don't have the conditioning. You look massive, but your conditioning sucks, and realistically conditioning almost always will win over size if you have somebody that's really big but they're real smooth and you have somebody that's not quite as big but they're diced the person who's diced is typically going to win yeah no i agree with that just have to i've a few girls and you can always see that on on the stages it quite obvious they just look better because they lean they like they look more muscular Yeah And what ends up happening too is you get people that they trying to fill out before they get on stage and they can Well, then after the show, they go out and they have pizza and beer and all this, and they wake up and they look amazing. And they're like, well, I must need to eat pizza and beer before I get on stage. That's got to be the magic recipe for this. And it's like, hey, you go ahead and try that your next show. We'll see what happens. And then they just look terrible. Yeah, whether or not taking the scrap notes, probably the water and the sodium as well is going to be a bit of a factor. Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. Especially when you look at long term dieting, right? What controls the retention of sodium in the body? Aldosterone and also cortisol. Cortisol can attach to the middle quarter quarter receptor until your kidneys to retain that as well. If you got to the point where you've got long term dieting and you've been bathing yourself in cortisol, you're dysregulating aldosterone and cortisol. then you end up to the point where you're not holding any sodium you look really flat and the minute you give sodium the body goes oh shit sodium yay and it just holds on to it and then you can't get it off and what do you do with in terms of training volumes or post-show training volume is that a case of say you know for example you you've gone up to say 30 sets per body part per week is it a case now the body's adapted the to that stimulus you need to continue with that or can you quite happily drop that back and still retain lean muscle tissue? I would, it depends. You know, everything depends on the state of the client. Like I have clients that they're so sick of training, that's the last thing they want, right? So at that point, it's like, okay, let's go to minimum effective volume and just go through the motions for a week. And then usually after that week, they're ready to roll, right? So it's mainly just, I want you to really relax after a show. There's no reason after you've just put yourself through six months of brutal training to get ready for this show. There's no reason to jump in to more brutal training. You probably need a break. So a lot of my clients, I'll tell them, don't even go to the fucking gym. Go do some fun shit. Go for long walks. Okay. And then go do some stuff. de-stressed, your body composition is not going to turn bad overnight like that. Then the second week, we'll start ramping it back up. It's going to be different on everybody. We have people that respond really well to 20 sets of workout and I've got guys that respond best to 50 sets of workout. You're really just training them long enough to understand where they need to be. I think it's that case of monitoring, tracking, all those sort of metrics It's coming to play a hell of a lot when it comes to that of going, okay, well, if you don't have the metrics, how can you justify change? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where all the metrics come in, right? I mean, we've seen the best results. If we can get them off the stage and get their HRV back to a good parasympathetic state, then they typically never put on fat post-contest. even eating what most people would consider a caloric load that should put a lot of fat on right but again like like i said we are guys when they go into a show they're usually eating way more than everyone else uh but we that's what we don't you don't see us putting a ton of people on on stage you see us putting people on stage when they've been screwed up by six or seven other trainers and then they come to us because they're sick of feeling like shit uh and they're sick of not placing and so we fix them up and then that you know they place top five like holy shit i've never placed top five and then then if they if they just continue on you know we can get them in the top three we can get them we can get them where they want to go as long as they trust in what we're doing and just do everything we say it's not that hard of a process it's just it just takes a lot of planning but that's that's on our end right so we sit around we do the planning we do the whiteboard sessions we figure out what they need to do over the next 12 months and then we pick the dates and then boom. So the way we do it, it's almost like military strategic planning, right? Like I know I've got a whole 12-month periodization for you. I know in every microcycle what's the theme of that microcycle and how does it play with all the other microcycles in this mesocycle? What's the theme of the mesocycle? And then those things all have to line up with the next mesocycle in line to then bring you to a point where now you've built a championship physique. And the problem is a lot of people don't want to go through that process. They want it right now because, you know, Coach Chick Jack on fucking Instagram says you can get ready in eight weeks, you know. And that probably has to do a lot with the reason they want to compete, right? Like they see somebody who's, you know, Insta-famous and they're like, I want to look like that and I want to look like that now. It's like, well, cool, but why? Like you know what your sort of determining factor of like do you actually want to compete or do you just want the fucking fame and money that this other person got Yeah And the thing is they all want it until they realize what it takes to get it And then you weed people out real quick with that. Like you find out really quickly who can go that far. Like I had a client. She wants to look like Dana Lynn Bailey. I'm like, okay, bro. We need a UK. Okay. Like, I don't think you understand what it's going to take to get there. Like that, that is a, that is going to be a chore. Like they'll look at like Hattie, look at Hattie. He's got a phenomenal, ridiculous physique. And these girls will come to say, I want to look like Hattie. I'm like, I don't think you get it. Like she tracks every little thing that goes in her mouth. She knows that she does everything 110%. Do you actually have the mindset to be able to achieve that? Because that's a one in a bazillion type of mindset to be able to do that. Yeah. And for how many years has she been sort of at the top of the game too? It's just like, absolutely. Like that takes some serious dedication and seriously wrapping your head around that process and, and also finding enjoyment in that process. And that's probably going back to how these, why like she had a, a powerful enough internal reason and of this is why I want to sort of do this. And she's, that's why she'd been able to be at the top of the game for X amount of years. Yeah, absolutely. And that's that, there's a championship mindset that you just very rarely find and that's why there's very few people that go to the top and stay at the top how do you think about i guess going into performance and athletic performance what about nutrition for optimizing performance i mean even touching on people like haddie and even laura simpson and stuff they're incredibly great gifted athletes as well as competitors. They're super fucking strong as well. So what about nutrition for performance? Are carbs and carb timing important? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, carbs are go juice, right? But it also depends on what your sport is, right? So every man... certain power lifter like a power lifters desire needs to have carbs it's going to be slightly different than say like a an afl athlete right so in in one sport you're using that as a major source of fuel so if i'm dealing with a soccer player afl rugby if i'm dealing with somebody's got to play 90 minutes at a really high level constantly sprinting stopping jogging walking and they're going man um you need carbohydrates to a be able to survive the entire 90 minutes at a high level you also need it for cognition the minute you run out of uh run out of blood sugar your brain starts to shut down you start making mistakes you make judgment errors your fine motor skills start to go away you know so your speed starts to go away and there's there's plenty of research on this where you know they take two soccer groups and one of them goes in fully carb loaded the other one goes in at 50 and they've analyzed how how much time each um each group spent sprinting and how many meters that they actually covered and it's it's drastically um much better to be fully loaded with carbs and then to maintain those carbs throughout that entire game because if you don't your your your performance progressively goes down now if you look at something like a powerlifting where they're mainly staying in you know stored atp and creatine phosphate except for like training in their accessory work they don't have a huge need for carbs other than a you've got to fill in the calories somehow and b the carbohydrates serve to mechanically make you stronger so if i have more carbs on board that means i have more water that means my cells are more or filled out much better which means i have more leverage around my joints so there's still a need for carbs in strength sports where it might be a one rep type of thing but it might be a little bit different than what you're using with a long distance event like a triathlon or or field event where they're actually using a lot of those carbs to delay fatigue and improve cognition over time i think like you know before we got on we were talking kind of about keto and things like that. I mean, I, I don't, I like keto. I've been doing keto on and off since I was 18 years old. I turned 42 next month. And so I consider myself pretty, pretty well first in all the various types of ketos because I've been doing it for, you know, 20, 20 something years. Um, but it's a, it's a tool, right? So if I'm a, if I'm just worried about physique and not performance, then a low carb diet works fantastic, right? If I need performance, is disastrous. If I went and did another Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu comp and I tried to do it low-carb, I would be done. You just can't. There's no way. And you can tell too when you go to a Jiu comp who well and who not because their performance match starts to get worse and worse and worse and they get gassed really early, whereas if you're well-conditioned and you have a lot of carbs on board, you don't get gassed as easily. You might have seven or eight matches all day, and your performance on match eight should be the same as match one if you're well-conditioned and prepared and if you're fully loaded with carbs. but a lot of these guys they want to get in the lower weight class so how do they do that they pull the carbs and the water out and then they try to put it back in while they're while they're competing and it just doesn't work whereas if you're smart you know your weight class fully carb loaded so then all you have to do is kind of maintain that over over the course of the event i tried to do keto and uh and jujitsu just to see what it would do and after two or three days of training, you go and you're all the guys that you're usually really good against about like about controlling them and submitting them and that type of thing. All of a sudden, they're just completely destroying you. And you realize I'm slower. I'm making I'm making mental mistakes. I'm not playing physical chess anymore. And then you learn really quick. OK, it's time for a carb load. So now you can you can get around some of this stuff. If you if you feel like you feel better on keto, some people might feel better. It might be a little bit more efficient for them to lose body fat. Just keeping in mind that if you need performance, then you might look at like a targeted keto approach or like a cyclical keto approach where, you know, once you feel like you've drained all of your glycogen, it's time for a carb up and then re-drain it and then carb up. And that's how you kind of get around making keto more for performance is you definitely need those carb load days or at the very least carbs before, during, and after you train. yeah that will give me my next question if you did like a tiger to keto could you do that on a daily basis and your pre-workout meal would be just be carbs and the rest of the day essentially just protein fat yeah you could absolutely do that but you also have to think too like keto is a lot of the a lot of people will talk about keto when it's unrelated to exercise When you throw exercise in the game, that throws a lot of the information off, right? And then depending on if it's low-level VO2 max or high-level VO2 max exercise, everyone says that keto has to be low-carb. Well, in order to understand it, we have to dictate what low-carb means. If I'm training three hours and grappling a day, low-carb for me might be 300 grams. I could have 300 grams if I'm training three hours hard and still be in ketosis. And I make that statement to people, that's impossible. You have to do a 20-gram induction phase and no more than 50 grams of carbs a day. All right, go train hard for three hours. Go eat 300 grams of carbs. Measure your blood on a ketometer, and you'll see that you're still making 1 to 2 millimoles of ketones. They all say that it has to be a high-fat diet. That is not true. Like if you do a protein-sparing modified fast and let's say you eat 200 grams of protein a day, so you're eating much higher protein than let's say you can eat in keto and you don't eat any fat and any carbs, I guarantee you, you're going to see a lot of ketones on there, right? But that's kind of the ultimate thing to do is you've got to test things. If you don't test things, then you have no idea how you're responding to it. And I've done all this stuff, right? I've worn continuous blood glucose devices, and I've taken so many sticks on my fingers for blood that my fingertips were purple. I couldn't get blood anymore. I started considering sticking my toes. That's how you know you're serious about the testing is when you're considering sticking your toe to get blood out so you can measure it on your glucometer and your ketometer, right? But most of the information that people are getting is bad information from people who they've got – they read the literature, but they've never applied anything. and so they actually don't even understand what happens when you take a high level athlete and you try some of these things out and they're not doing any experimentation and that's what you have to do to truly understand this stuff yeah I guess it goes back to those subjective and objective measurements that you need both say that again you broke up a little bit I guess it goes back to those subjective and objective measurements or metrics that you need both of them you can't just go okay well I feel this way it's like cool what's your blood glucose levels actually look like Like what's the actual midway? Absolutely. And, um, you know, it's, uh, one of the graphs I have, you know, you look at these guys that call themselves evidence-based, right? And most of the guys who are evidence-based, especially the really young guys, they've not trained anyone. What they need to say is I'm research paper based and what they're, they're fucking paper champs, right? Um, evidence-based should be that. Yes. I look in the literature, but I also have tens of thousands of hours of actual under the bar training people, training myself.

time and then I try to compare those two things together because what you end up doing you get guys that basically masturbate to research and then when you actually try to apply the research it doesn't work or someone tries to replicate that research and no one else can replicate the whatever they found in that that paper and then you're like well shit then that research that you're you're on top of the mountain screaming at everybody that you know this is dumb and you should do this and then you're looking like that's the only paper that's shown that and no one's been able to replicate the the outcome that paper's full of shit you know but then you've got all the bro scientists too that they they they talk about empirical observation is this is the blah blah blah this is the key um but then you have a research a couple of research papers that says they're full of shit well you're obviously full of shit like you know you've got it this is it's why it becomes so convoluted in our industries you need to look at all this stuff right so it's it's not good to just be a researcher you want to be a bro scientist too you don't want to be just a bro scientist you need to look at your ideas and try to confirm them or try to falsify them with with with peer-reviewed evidence right and somewhere in the middle is lies the truth of all this stuff yeah there's a lot of shit we haven't there's a lot of shit we haven't researched and we know the shit works no one's ever falsified it no one's going to pay to research it if you If you look at some of the newest literature on protein amounts, right, you know, the RDA said 8 grams per kilogram. And then research came out and said, no, for performance, you really need one. Then it was 1.2. Then it was 1.4. Then it was 1.6. Last year, a paper came out saying it's probably 1.8. And in that research paper, they said, well, we know that there have been studies up to 4.4 grams per kilogram with no ill effects. you might as well just do 2.2 grams per kilogram if we know we see that it's 1.8 that way it doesn't leave any doubt you know you're getting enough protein and i looked at that paper and i went huh where have i heard one gram per pound of body weight oh arnold schwarzenegger they weren't that dumb to be to look at their empirical observations and eating one gram per pound of protein, we're now confirming it's 70 years since they first started doing it, right? It's decades since, you know, it's over 50 years since they were talking about 10 to 12 being the ideal rep range for hypertrophy. Now we've got research papers that confirm that. If we wait for research to confirm what we see empirically, then we're going to be way behind the times. Holy shit. Sorry, I just got on my soapbox. I mean, you got me sent in as fuck for me to listen to you go for it so by all means keep going how do you um think about conditioning structuring conditioning so we're looking at athletic performance do you look at from an energy system standpoint do you okay i've got to hit the lactic threshold air lactic like how do you think about that when you're setting up for it yeah so you so you've got to look at you got to look at it in different phases right so you know it depends what the sport is it depends on the needs of that sport right which is easy to look up in the literature and then you know then making some good judgment calls on what needs to be done first so for instance you can have someone who um is well conditioned but too anaerobically conditioned and not aerobically conditioned if i see this a lot especially with fighters where they can go for a long time but they're they're pushing themselves through they're exhausted they're not producing any power and then they feel horrible after their training when we look at we'll do like a cooper's test and some other things we can do a test and we find their vo2 maxes is not probably where it needs to be um we need to probably work on vo2 max and lactate threshold we need to be able to have them sustain a high level of conditioning and to be able to not just rely on the anaerobic side but also the aerobic side so when the aerobic reserve needs to be at a certain level the anaerobic reserve so that they can last all the rounds they need to while replicating continued punching power, kicking power, and things like that. So in that case, a lot of times we need to talk to a client that they need to go slower first. They need to rebuild that aerobic side of things because everything is built on that foundation of aerobics. So if you think about the saying in strength and conditioning is that strength is the mother of all qualities, right? So in order to build power and speed, reactive force, all that, you have to have a certain level of strength to then have everything on platform. So my contribution is aerobic is the mother quality of all conditioning. So you can be well but if you not well especially having a good aerobic base you can repeat that stuff often and you can recover from it well So we think about okay let create this really nice broad foundation of aerobic capacity And then from then now let work on your power endurance Let's work on the anaerobic side. If it's alactic, we understand too. If you think about an alactic sport, you look at fighting. Fighting is going to be massively alactic. You might have a one-two punch and then you back off a little bit. So you might have a two-second exchange. You kind of pace yourself, you back off a little bit, you might have five or six seconds before you go in again. So on paper that looks alactic, but if you repeat that over five minutes in a round, it becomes massively anaerobic, or massively lactic and massively aerobic as the round gets longer and as a 15 to 25 minute fight progresses, you get more and more dependent on that aerobic system, which is what a lot of people these days are told not to work on. So I feel it's a really good idea to create a good aerobic base okay then from there now shift everything into an anaerobic side whether that's lactic or alactic but pay respect to that aerobic side because that's what's supporting your anaerobic system and enabling you to recover between bouts of activity would it be possible to be able to i guess train all those different um energy systems in the same block or the same phase or would you recommend cool let's spend six to eight weeks aerobically and then let's transition? Or is it possible to do it all almost at once? Yeah, it depends on time, man. It depends on resources. How much time do you have? So it's probably, you can compartmentalize it and say, all right, here's what your metrics say. This is what your testing says. Maybe we work on six weeks of the aerobic side and then we start layering in some anaerobic stuff too. You can do that or you can just do it concurrently. The main thing is to think about this in dollars, right? Everybody understands money. I've got $100. How much of that am I going to invest in each thing that I need to work on? So I need to invest the bulk of it in the thing that's the worst. then any more more money on the skill specific uh and then on the anaerobics or whatever you need for whatever's dictated by your uh sport you spend a little bit more money on that and a little bit less on the other stuff but you still have to spend money on some of this stuff because you want to maintain that right um you see it all the time like if you watch like we watch a lot of ufc and you'll see someone who's very well conditioned. Maybe they don't punch that hard, but they can punch the same repeatedly and they never get tired, like the Diaz brothers. They never get tired. They're not really going to knock anybody out, but their game plan is to take punishment until they tire you out and then they try to get you on the ground, right? Then you look at somebody like a Conor McGregor who's a knockout artist. He does really well the first round. The second round you start seeing the mouth breathing. his hands are getting a little bit lower and they're not getting up fast enough by the third round he's completely shattered and he's just hanging on like somewhere somewhere in between that is kind of the key right if i can have endurance like nate diaz and if i can have the power and the reproducing that power over a long time like connor uh connor mcgregor i would have a really good uh a really good well-rounded combat athlete so it's like if they both had a kid together man that would be a hell of a hell of an mma guy i'd be kind of ugly kid but yeah that's kind of how you think about it and um you know there's a lot of testing like running a cooper's test and saying if we do a cooper's test we'll typically do a 12 minute test and what we want to track is what is the highest you can get your heart rate to so that's your maximal heart rate then we look at what's the average heart rate that you're actually able to sustain over that 12 minute period. When you divide the average heart rate by the maximal heart rate, that's going to give you a percentage. If it's low, then that means you're more anaerobically dominated in your energy system for your training. If it's high, then you're more aerobically. So if we think about a sweet spot being somewhere like the mid 80s, that would be a sweet spot where you can go on for a long time. So you got good aerobic fitness or endurance, but it's low enough to where you can maintain your power over the course of the sport that you're doing. If I move it too high on the aerobic side, I start losing power production at the expense of being able to go forever. If it's too low, I can produce a lot more power but I can't produce it often so I don't have the distance with it. So somewhere in the middle, if I can get them blended down, then that seems to be the best area for them to be if they want to perform at a high level for an extended period of time. So when we talk about high level sports and looking at I guess that variety of training different energy systems and different I guess looking at overall strength and condition when we talk about something like CrossFit So CrossFit obviously is very I guess sporadic in terms of their training and how they sort of structure it What are your thoughts on CrossFit as a whole? I mean, you know what, it's just like anything else. It depends on what box you go to, right? So it's just like this, man. If I go into fitness first and there's 20 trainers there, they're not all going to be good. Most of them are going to be pretty shit, to be honest. There's going to be one or two guys that are really keen, and then the other ones are just going to be terrible. Same thing with CrossFit. If you have somebody that only does CrossFit education, they're probably not going to be that good. If the guys that come to our courses or they go to Kilo Strength Society and they learn their programming, if they're seeking people outside and kind of blending that together, that's where you're going to find the best, most well-rounded CrossFit coaches, and they're typically going to have the most well-rounded CrossFit athletes. I think one thing that, like I said, there's a lot of good and bad. One of the things that I noticed with CrossFit is it tends to attract a lot of people that have addiction issues, and what I mean by that is they're addicted to exercise, right? So you get people, especially they think they're going to be the next championship CrossFit guy, and they'll train three hours a day, twice a day, and they don't realize that that's probably not all that necessary, that they need to really streamline and work on the stuff they're really bad at and even everything out and bring it up together. And they also tend to overtrain a lot or overexercise a lot, and they don't feed it, especially the women. they will train 6-7 hours a day and they're eating fuck all calories and they want to know why their performance sucks and why they keep getting injured and if you keep getting injured and you're dieting you need to really stop dieting and work on fixing yourself up even from our clinic perspective the majority of the athletes that come into our clinic we give them rehab modalities they've been to a chiropractor They're all diagnosed with the same issue. They've all given them roughly the same treatment plan. None of it's ever worked. So they come to us and they tell us, yeah, I've been to this person, this person, this person. They all basically told me the same thing. We put them on the table. We're like, we're going to tell you the same thing. Like your diagnosis is correct. All these rehab exercises are correct. So now we need to find out why the rehab stuff isn't working. And almost 9.9 times out of 10, they're dieting and not eating enough to support the rehab. and the minute we get them to double their calories, all of a sudden all their injuries magically go away and all of a sudden the rehab works, right? But when you're working on high-level athletes, nutrition is the hardest thing to get them to understand, especially when it comes down to weight class athletes. Weight class athletes, they know that to keep their weight down, they under-eat, but they under-eat way too much. rather than making it just that happy little medium under eat just enough make sure your TD is enough and you'll be absolutely fine they're scared to death to eat more because they think they're going to put on weight but most of them are eating so far below their TD EE that even if they doubled or tripled their calories they would still be in a deficit so we put them on higher calories they never gain weight but they get better but those are some of the issues I see with CrossFit but I like CrossFit as a whole I think if you don't have enough time and you get to it, you can find a really good CrossFit box. They're very efficient with what they do because they work really hard, really fast, and then they recover. Or that's how it should be done. When you kind of first walk into a CrossFit box, a lot of the CrossFit facilities I've gone to and kind of like joined in the workouts, you'll have a really nice concurrent model of a workout where the first 20 minutes, they'll say, okay, we're going to work up to your heaviest five reps on a squat. You've got 20 minutes to get there. Then the next 15 or 20 minutes might be like a really brutal Metcon. And usually now they're pretty well-rounded, and in the last 20 minutes, well, they'll practice gymnastics or they'll do some other conditioning or something else. So I've been really impressed in the last couple of years with some of the places I've gone to because it seems like they're really dialing in what they're doing, and it's making a lot more sense than it did 10 years ago. Is it, I guess, quite an efficient training modality to have the strength and the condition in the same workout? I guess you're not going to get the best of both worlds. You'll get somewhere in the middle. Is that right in thinking? Yeah, I think it depends what you're looking for. You'll have a lot of people talk about interference effects between strength training and conditioning and all that. I had some talks of me and Mike T Nelson and some other guys and when we start thinking about that interference effect is so such a low percentage it not really something people need to be worried about because people seem to think that if they go do an hour-long weightlifting session and then do 20 minutes of aerobics after it oh you just wasted your whole session realistically that's not true and it's probably not worth worrying too much about what I've noticed over the last 10 years is the majority of it comes to their food if they just feed for performance instead of focusing on feeding for fat loss or feeding for hypertrophy feed for performance that usually overrides a lot of this a lot of the things that people see and the thing is like most of the people that go to CrossFit they don't want to build slabs of muscle right there you look at most gen pop people they don't want to be dick skin lean they want to be unfat um they don't want to they don't want to bench press 200 kilos they just want to look be a little bit stronger so i think crossfit fills in a lot of that stuff where it's it's group training everybody's having a good time they've got their community they they've got their friends there they all do it together they've got support and i think that's what they do really well um something that that my wife zoe said to me once is that you know it looks like people go to people go to crossfit to get more fit but they stay because of the community and that's something that crossfit does really well is they've built this amazing community that you don't see in this industry anymore because everybody wants to be solo lone wolves and they're they're scared of opening up and building that yeah and i think one thing crossfit do really well as well is they everyone in there will train hard like they will build that mental capacity to go i'm here to actually work yeah yeah and then the only i mean the only downside of that is sometimes they you get caught up in the moment and you start trying to do things you're not qualified to do yet and train at a level you're not qualified to train and then you get injured but you know as long as you're at a really good um a really good facility with coaches that have been in the industry for a long time they're going to know to tell you to chill the fuck out is there anyone in the CrossFit world, I guess, companies that are doing it quite well, do you think, like programming quite well, and they really know their stuff? As far as CrossFit, you broke up a little bit there, so, yeah, you know what, I'd have to remember, because there's so many different names to these CrossFit places, I'd have to look up what the names are, I will tell you this, like, one of my mentorship students is one of the guys that kind of runs CrossFit Wanderlust in Bali. His name is Matt Bolton. Hold on a second. He actually just came and stayed here, him and his partner, and did like three days of intense mentorship. He does online mentorship swimming too. So a lot of the stuff they do there with their training is a little bit different because it tends to make more sense and it tends to flow a little bit better. So they've also opened up a thing called Macro Kitchen, which is pretty cool. They make pre-done meals, but they also, if you just go in there to eat, you can tell them what you want your macros to be, and they'll prepare your meal right then for exactly what macros you want. So his partner, Henim, does all of that. And he was here learning for three days, and all she did was sit at her computer and create meal plans and meals and all the meals that they're going to start eating and serving at Macro Kitchen. So if people are in Bali, I highly recommend they go by CrossFit Wanderlust and that they go by Macro Kitchen. Because a lot of the followers on this podcast are Australian, I think Aussies spend a lot of time in Bali anyway. So guys, please go there. Yeah. Man, I haven't eaten today because I'm intermittent fasting right now and it's well past my eating window. So when I was trying to remember Matt's name, his Instagram is Boltz. So I was like, Matt Boltz, Boltz, oh shit, shit, Boltz, Matt Boltz. Sorry, Matt. What does the first sort of hour of your day look like? How do you optimize mental, physical performance for the day ahead? Or do you not have anything? Bro, you understand I'm a real weirdo. So the first thing I do, I wake up, go into my kitchen, and I'm too lazy to actually make myself a coffee, so I pull down a thing of instant coffee and I put two tablespoons of instant coffee in my mouth, I put some water in there, I shake my head to disintegrate and I swallow it. And that's how I do it. That's like old school Mr. Bean. Yeah, that's what I do. And then, you know, normally it's like a little cuddle time with Zoe and the dogs.

and then man I just get my day started so you know it depends sometimes I go straight to the gym and I trains we've got a really nice home gym all Atlantis equipment and so for me by the end of the day I'm so exhausted that I'll say I'm gonna work out at 5 p.m 5 p.m gets there and I'm just done so I find that if I just go in and train in the morning get it over with and then start work okay cool and I guess on the other side of the spectrum do you have a specific like nighttime routine or anything yeah i do actually so nighttime routine is um is you know i'll work as long as my brain will work so i'll work and that's for me nowadays it's like if i'm if i start at you know 5 a.m and start doing stuff about five six o'clock my brain is just done so typically i cook it usually cook a semi-decent dinner i might sit we built a cinema room here and it's like a lecture room cinema room so i'll go in there crank on the projector i watch a little bit of netflix something like that and then um and then i'll have like the last kind of meal treat of the day is i usually eat a 700 gram uh container of greek yogurt so uh the the yo pro stuff i'll usually sit there and eat that and then you know i'll get in bed and maybe try to read a little bit or something and go to bed so but um like i i found a couple of papers on um on having like casein protein before bed and one of them it was they did a study it was 27.5 grams of protein 15 grams of carbs and like one gram of fat and they did another one that was 0.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight and what they showed was that the the people doing that study they tended to stay a bit more anti-catabolic while they were sleeping they ended up building more muscle especially specific to fast twitch muscle and they tended to be able to regulate their appetite more the next day so i said okay i'll try it so i started doing that for a couple of weeks and i found it was really effective especially when i was dieting so that's like i always plan for that to be my because i sit there and eat a bunch of netflix and i'll throw some blueberries in or something like that a perfect meal right before bed and the 700 grams is around 67 grams of protein so it's right up there like almost dead perfect with my body weight perfect um obviously you study a fair bit um on in terms of memory and returning information do you have any tips tricks tools that you use for that number one get plenty of sleep man that's that's the big one and that's the one that people people are willing to sacrifice their sleep to try to get ahead one of the big things is turning short term memory into long term memory and for that you need deep sleep I tell a lot of people, I had a buddy the other day because I've come up with some pretty crazy brain stacks over the years and I've gotten to the point where now that I prioritize sleep I don't need the brain stacks anymore so one thing I take pretty often is Thorne Research Neurochondria that tends to be really good for memory there's a product from the states which is qualia i was using that for a while but it's it's god awful expensive with the exchange rate and the shipping and all that so i don't use that anymore i basically i just use the neurochondria really and and the crazy amount of caffeine like i i drink enough caffeine to kill a small child and i will i do nicotine right i do the little many laws there's nicotine so when you do nicotine it serves a couple of purposes for me a it helps to suppress my appetite a little bit and b it stimulates memory and learning by stimulating acetylcholine receptors so but it's definitely it's not for everybody some people just really hate it i like it so i'll typically take you know a few of those a day and just sit around and study and the last thing is repetition the hardest part about learning is the initial building the initial foundational knowledge but once you can build that really wide it's very easy to layer new knowledge on top of that so like once i once i taught myself the basics of biochemistry and i knew that really well like drawing out glycolysis through krebs cycle through electron transport chain and also you know where fat enters that protein oxidation all that once i built a solid foundation of that then when you start looking at metabolic regulation through other means when you start looking at the excess metabolism portion, you read it one time and you remember it because you're so familiar with that information. Anatomy is not my thing. I hired a therapist to teach a lot of our anatomy stuff because he an anatomy wizard I know I like the normal personal trainer I know just enough anatomy to be dangerous And so now, but the foundation was big enough to where now that I'm really studying anatomy, once I see something, it clicks and it stays in there. So for a lot of people, you just have to understand that just like building a championship physique, building a championship level of knowledge just takes steady, obsessive work. and in repetition i guess you are yeah you're building those neural links over time just a little that compound effect interest every sort of single day yeah absolutely and there's uh there's a um a good book about it um a mind for numbers by barbara oakley um that's a really good book about like focus versus diffuse learning how to learn things that you're not really great at like I'm not good for I'm not good with numbers my wife Zoe is I'm more of a more of an English rhetoric type of person so when I'm learning new ways of math it's it's very difficult for me but the more I work on it the easier it gets to that and then start doing numbers in your head and things like that so I've actually gotten way better than I was my earlier times which is is really important for science because there's going to be a lot of calculations and things that go into learning a science, especially chemistry. Right. So important to know, but for a lot of people, just understanding that adults don't like to feel ignorant. Um, adults don't like being bad at something. So if you think back at when you were a kid and you first learned how to ride a bike, like, you know, your father and your mother, someone, someone had training wheels on your bike and that, that allowed you to figure out how to pedal and how to steer. Then eventually they had to take the training wheels off, and they pushed you, and you were really happy because you could get a few meters, and then you'd fall over and bust your knee up, you know. But when you're a kid, you don't understand what feeling humiliated is when you're that young. You just get back on the bike, and you keep trying again until you can... like to feel adequate but they don't like to feel ignorant um but if you really want to learn something you got to let go of that because if you if you like hold on to that stuff for a long time that's going to get in your way of actually truly learning something and you just need to go balls deep and just repetition and had just get an obsessive thirst for knowledge and then it then And man, learning gets great after that because you just want to know more and more and more, right? So you just get layers and layers of knowledge on top of each other. With all your experience and knowledge and specifically in training, is there a particular modality that you enjoy most or that you've loved most over the years, whether that's GVT or 6-12-25 method or whatever it might be? Yeah. Oh, man, I fucking hate GVT. Yeah, it's boring as shit. it's like the prowler like you just love to hate the prowler the prowler is so effective but it sucks when you're doing it the same thing with gvt man if you want to bring a body part up quick if you just want it to grow you're not going to get strong on it um you just want a muscle to be bigger man you smash it with gvt and it gets really big really fast but like my favorite ways of training i love uh i love german body comp i think that's for general population that's probably one of the most perfect templates you can use and it's so versatile you could program a german body comp linear periodization alternating periodization you could put layer on anything you want to with it um escalating density training there's a lot of stuff you could do but i i'm if i'm writing my own workouts and i'm probably going to do something like an athletic gbc where you're doing some contrast training so i might go in and hit a heavy three or five rep max on a squat and then go to box jumps or hurdles or you know something that's athletic because because i'm the i'm the type of guy i need to do something heavy or and or fast in every single session so if i can come in and just do my my a1 a2 as like really fast explosive and heavy maybe throw weight releasers on there bands and chains that satisfies my need for that and then i can do that for 20 minutes and then the other 40 i don't mind doing a pump up bodybuilder bullshit that I know I need to do, but I don't like doing it, then I don't mind doing that shit after that. So that would probably be my favorite is that or like what I was doing when I was powerlifting, which is kind of a blend, kind of a template I created that blends west side types of conjugate training with Paula Quinn style of programming where, you know, I would come in and my ace that would be my indicator lift So that might be a maximal effort lift or it might be dynamic effort or it might be a repetition effort whichever whatever depends on what I need to get out of that training block And then my B1 B2 C1 C2 D1 D2 would all be standard like standard alternating periodization, where the accessory and the supplementary work, that's what I would really periodize block to block. And then my indicator list, I would change when they weren't getting any better right and i found that's that's what i used that i created when i was powerlifting in my mid-20s and that's what kind of that's what got me to a 333 kilo deadlift and a 318 squat so it always worked really well for me and then i still get that kind of that competition where i'm trying to beat the last thing i did with either moving something faster or lifting more weight on the bar but now i love that sort of training modality i'm very similar i think to you is that if i don't lift heavy i just i don't want to go in and work out yeah 100 now now that i'm now that i'm older though i am starting to get into like i haven't done true bodybuilding training a long time where i just do straight sets and just try to pump the fuck out of my chest and back and whatever and i did a session like that the other day and i was like man this feels pretty gnarly man maybe i should start doing more pop-up work um who's the who's your biggest inspiration you think throughout your life who's somebody that really inspired you to to keep wanting to be better to grow to get smarter to be the best version of yourself you know you know it's gonna it's gonna be a it's it's a few people man like obviously to pay tribute to charles uh charles poliquin was my first if you could call it first love in a in the thing because that's when when testosterone magazine came out online back when it was like what was the testosterone.net i mean this is back in shit this is back in like 1998 and uh you know i was learning from all these people like charles staley was putting out articles paul check was putting out articles charles poliquin charles's stuff resonated more with me being like you know like naturally his training really resonated sort of doing his stuff like fantastically well no matter what I did no matter what system I used that he was promoting it all worked really well and so um I kind of grabbed on that that was in the early stages of my career my biggest inspiration of learning how to how to write training programs and things like that and then then i got into kind of uh you know the last few years meeting dr james laval he became a big inspiration and made me really want to understand the chemistry side of things um and then like dr brian walsh who's a good friend of mine he makes me want like he's like one of the best dudes in the world and like trying to be more like brian and just do my thing and do it well and then and lately I've been doing a graduate diploma in performance nutrition. And like, Lauren Bannock at the Institute of Performance Nutrition, like he's a big inspiration for me now because he's in the lab and he's doing all this stuff and he's training these high level athletes and he's, he's creating all this really cool educational stuff and opening doors for people who are going a non-traditional route of education, right? Where, you know, maybe you don't want to do a four-year degree in dietetics or a four-year degree in nutrition well you can do these other things that basically slim down just to the stuff you actually need to know and just only concentrate on performance nutrition because uh like if i was still in the united states if i wanted to get a degree in this stuff um i would have to take all these bullshit classes that has nothing to do with what i want to do right and and like i'd have to take United States history and I'd have to take all this other bullshit and it's like what I don't need to know United States history to write people's fucking performance nutrition so you know there's guys like him that are making opening up doors for people to be able to jump into a graduate level university class and actually get proper credentials without having to go through the bullshit of a normal bachelor degree and learning shit that you don't need to know right so that's a big inspiration for me too and that their program is is hard as hell um but it is well designed like the information i'm learning there you know the the initial part of it was a lot of stuff i already knew but filling in a lot of gaps and now it's progressively rolling into holy shit this is crazy so i can't recommend their stuff uh enough if you if someone has the time and the money to to go for a post graduate degree, it's fantastic. And do you think that's going to influence the next phase of your own programming within Muscle Nerds Yeah I think I think because I would love to get to a point where the muscle nerds was autonomous I have an incredible staff and they just keep getting better I'd love to get to the point where we expand a little bit more and then I can kind of step back a little bit and start mainly doing more of the running of the business instead of working in the business and then do what I like to do, which is research and development, creation, things like that. And I'd love to start working with more high, high-level performance athletes, like high-level MMA guys, high-level sports. And they kind of just have five or six of those on the side. So in order to do that, I really need the credentials. So that's why I decided to jump into the graduate program, so that I could go ahead and get that legitimacy, right? Because the stuff that I've done and the stuff that I have, it's not high level enough to dictate like getting a boxer, you know, that makes $50 million like a Mayweather, you know, that type of thing, right? And that's the kind of stuff I want to do because I want to be able to, in the second half of my career, I want to be able to have a little bit more fun and kind of raise the bar a little bit and show what we can do on a bigger scale. That'll be cool. that's going to be really cool to see your journey and get because i've no doubt you're going to get to that level it's a matter of time right um it'd be great to see someone like you get there and and essentially be able to change the game and sort of program people correctly i think we we shared a bit of a post uh it was a little braun james doing a squat and i found like a bit of a giggle over and i was just like how the fuck could this even be allowed it was pathetic that that was mind-blowing i could not believe that um but hey look it is what it is um a lot of the things with um becoming a a coach for that type of athlete has nothing to do with what you know it's it's about who you know and a lot of these a lot of these celebrities and a lot of these um these uh high level sports athletes they end up getting trained by somebody that knows somebody that they know it has they have but their knowledge is yeah no i am uh it's crazy to see i mean the um the sort of the future for me is to go into the acting industry and when i see sort of transformations through you know like the rock and henry cavill and all these sort of guys uh like henry cavill did the crazy thing for which like dehydrate the fuck out of himself i'm like did you need to do that yeah yeah like it sounds great but one of the hardest things about the um about the acting industry is that they just they more often than not don't have a lot of time they find out they get a role they find out they're going to be shooting in three months i need you to look a certain way so then they have to do crazy things because they just simply don't have enough time because they don't have enough notice yeah i guess that's where the difficulty comes in that you should almost always stay i guess as you would with anything competing a comp or a photo shoot if you always stay three four weeks out wherever it might be then you don't have to be so drastic yeah yeah i mean if you've got if you know you're going to get a part you've got a year to prep that's a good optimal way of doing it but practically you know they might have six weeks before they have to look a certain way and they might have just gotten off a movie where they had to look one way and now they got to look the extreme of the other. Like, who is it? Christian Bale. When he was doing like, he did like Batman and he's like doing the, what is it, the machinist. And he's got to, you know, he's got to look two completely crazy different ways with not a lot of time to do it. It's just insanity. But that's Hollywood, isn't it? Yeah. That's where you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do. Yeah, right. Is there any specific books that you recommend people reading, whether that's in the health and fitness industry, whether it's, I know you're into some fantasy reading, things like that. Is there a couple of books that you're like, that's something that everyone needs to read? I think that Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, that if you like fantasy, like I'm big in the, like I love sci-fi, I love fantasy. I think that it's like a, it's philosophy, but it's in a fantasy story kind of story building type thing and it's fantastic and it's basically all about giving you permission to take care of yourself before you take care of others that it's good to be generous it's good to be compassionate it's good to be that philanthropy but don't do it at the sake of setting yourself on fire to help other people and so because that's what i i spent too many years doing that i i had a problem saying no to people and then it just it basically just it wore me out to the point where I just I can't be there for everybody so I had to learn how to say no and stop being so altruistic

that I'm starting to read Dune for the millionth time. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this time. I think Dune, for the same reasons, there's just a philosophical background behind it. If it comes to training, I think there's a book by Hargrave called Exercise Metabolism. I think all coaches should read that book. If you don't understand the book, come to our courses. I promise you after you come to the course, you'll understand how to read the stuff in the book. I think that Joel Jameson's stuff with the conditioning is fantastic. I think everybody should look into that. That's eight weeks out, right? What's that? Eight weeks out. Is that the? Eightweeksout.com. Yeah, BioForce, that stuff. If you want to learn conditioning, that. I think Mike T. Nelson, you know, a lot of people are getting into like the flexible dieting thing. He's got a great certification for flexible dieting. um it's it's and i i honestly think that if more coaches told their clients to jump on that his uh his metflex certification you'd have a lot easier time getting your clients to understand nutrition because he does he he he's not overly technical in a certification he speaks in like normal plain language and like if more if more clients would do a little bit of extra learning like that it would make our job as nutritionists a lot easier because we wouldn't have to educate them so much just let somebody else do the heavy lifting and then we fill in the gaps you know i mean shit man i could tell you so many books we've got bazillions of books um yeah but i mean my thing now is kind of getting into the philosophy type stuff and um how to be a better person the second half of my life and i'm getting to that age where it's like you start thinking all right man i might i might have another 40 50 years left here if i'm lucky starting to think about you know pondering death and shit like that so i'm actually reading a book uh called momento mori and it's all about the Romans look at it they look at it and so it's a lot of thing I'm only about 30 pages deep in it but it's been pretty good so far yeah I guess that's into stoicism like Marco Aurelius and Epictetus things like that yeah have you read any books by Ryan Holiday? no I haven't I've been meaning to I've just got so many books on the list so far But if you're into that sort of stuff Ryan holidays books will probably resonate with you quite well Yeah, I like I like the idea of the stoicism. I like the philosophy and kind of blending that with Some of the other people that people may love or hate like Jordan Peterson you know taking you know it it weird like Everybody always tries to look look at things and they want to be on team A or team B right So I can tell one person I like Jordan Peterson's stuff and they can say, oh, you know, he says all these bad things. I'm like, yeah, well, I'm not going to listen to the bad things. I want the good things. So being able to, you know, being able to critically think for yourself and pulling what's useful out of everything and just getting rid of the rest of the shit. and so there's things in all different types of philosophy that you can put together and try to figure out like my just like with training you know i can learn all these methods i can learn conditioning and strength and i can learn different types of nutritional setups and i i need to pick and choose what's going to work best for each individual client put it together the same way you look at you know learning different types of philosophy and ways to live and that type of thing yeah and i guess that's what philosophy is right it's teaching you how to think it's not like this is the absolute it's like no what do you think of it yeah yeah i think that's a missing thing too like it's cool though like man can you imagine who who if you look five years ago nobody was talking about philosophy and now you got all these guys that are now bringing this up now now people are starting to read into it and say okay how do i be a how do i be a better human man how to be how do i be a better man right how to be a better whatever um and i think that's part the key of it is looking at that and trying to what's the fucking meaning of life type bullshit you know and that depends on depends on you like what's what is your meaning of life right so we can get a real metaphysical yeah i'll talk about that stuff i love it i love it um i want to be super respectful your time mate but what's next for um what's next for mosslanders what's on the 2020 agenda uh i get married in a couple weeks oh congrats yeah thanks we got that going on and in march i'm heading back to the states to texas to do our program design course uh got the netherlands in june i'll be back in texas in october i'll be speaking a swiss in october if uh you know i think people always ask me what they should you know if they're going to budget for their education what should they budget for and of course I'm going to say go to my courses but I always tell people look, find the courses that resonate the best, it's going to make you the best return on investment and the ones that line up with your clients like if you don't have any powerlifting clients, don't fucking go to a powerlifting seminar, go to something that's going to be better to teach your clients how to move for them right? So when you look at your budget I think people should always go to one big symposium, at least one big symposium every year and then spend the rest of their money on the courses they want to do and mix it up between some online and in-person stuff swiss in canada is one of the big symposiums i highly recommend comes out every other year and it is probably the best symposium i ever been to and everybody in most everybody in europe and north america they all there man um you know so christian this year christian tibideau is going to be there i be speaking paul check usually speaks bill casmeyer is there matt winning is there like uh fuck i think paul carter's speaking at it this year john meadow speaks at it eric serrano like where where can you go and have all of those dudes in one fucking hotel all talking and getting drunk and hanging out like you can't you can you'll never find that anywhere except at swiss and this year in october they're having it is it would it be easily i guess understandable for like a moron like me be able to go and okay is the information actually absorbable is it am i going to look at the stage and go, I should not be here. No, no, no. Because most of the people, all of the people who lecture there are pretty experienced lecturers. They know at what level they need to teach at. So it's not like, man, I go to these medical conferences sometimes and within five minutes I'm sitting here thinking, I have no idea what this guy is doing. Because it's so far from my current – I'm just sitting the whole time laughing like, man, I feel like I'm a big retard right now. I have no idea what these people are talking about. Swiss is not like that at all. They tend to get it at just the right level. And then they have a few different types of – they have a few rooms. They have a nutrition room, a rehab room, a training room. So you just kind of determine what you're going there for. And you find out – you look at which speaker you want to hear. and you just kind of fill out your whole schedule of what you want to do and who you want to see and that type of thing. I think it's fucking fantastic. I'm glad Ken brought that back in 2015 because it's a lot of work for him, but shit, man, it does such a good job at getting everybody together and raising the bar of knowledge of what we should all be focusing on. and I guess lastly where can people find you what's the best contacts to reach out to you guys for any queries questions for your education yeah so like correspondence is always best through email so info at muscle nerds dot net Dale is in the office you usually hear from her she's fantastic you know we do we've got our Instagram everybody's got an Instagram these days so it's muscle nerds underscore health if you want to be friends with me on Instagram that's cool just understand that all I post on there are dogs and jujitsu and really horrible off color jokes so if you've got a good sense of humor you'll probably like that but I don't do much online with that stuff anymore we got on Facebook we got Muscle Nerds on Facebook so you can find us there And then our website our new website about to drop so that's exciting. So we've been working on, we had a really rubbish website, we've been working on it for over a year now, so it's going to drop and it's going to be fantastic, right? And when does that drop? Can you say that? I'm hoping in the next two weeks it'll be online, yeah. Cool. and then we've got new portals we're working on for education to raise the bar with the education stuff we're doing. With our program design, it started out at eight weeks. Then we went to 10 weeks. Now it's coming out to be something like 12 weeks. We've added in sales and marketing. We hired a sales and marketing expert to write some content so that the guys can figure out, now that you know how to program correctly, how do I leverage it and make more money? That way you have both that. I'm helping my clients, but I need to also get paid when I'm worth type of thing. So, I mean, that program has been crazy for us because we wanted to do something no one else is doing. So with our program design, we teach you all the ins and outs of exercise metabolism. It's not just sets, reps, time, and attention. We talk about the psychology of things. We talk about assessments and treatment stuff. Like you go through it multiple times. You don't just go through it once. You go through it three or four times on the online content, and then we have an in-person seminar you come to as well, and you can come to that a few times as well. Because we want people to come to the seminars and actually learn how to do things correctly. We don't want people to just pay us, show up, not pay attention, and go home and just get a certification and say, oh, yeah, I attended this. No, the points for you to come learn how to do shouldn't be a better coach, not just to be there, right? So that type of thing is really important for us. So we've come up with some ways of doing things that require a hell of a lot more work than other certifications in the industry. And I think that's what definitely sets you guys apart of going that extra mile and actually giving a shit about people's knowledge and education and knowing that the better they are, the better their clients are going to be. And we can, one at a time, make the world a bit of a better, healthier place. Absolutely. I mean, look, knowledge is power. the more of us that get on the same kind of uh the same kind of vibe on how things should be done the faster we change the industry and stop screwing people up i guess that raises the bar even more to the i guess the potential of humankind as a whole 100 100 man gotta do everything we gotta do things the ethical way and do it the right way and stop being so money centric and be more client centric and do what's right for them not for us man i think that's a perfect note to finish this podcast on. Guys, Luke and Muscle Nose will all be linked in the show notes. So if you want to check them out, please reach out there. Luke, I just want to thank you again for taking all the time to chat with me today. All right, my brother. Thanks for having me on. You're welcome, man.