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.