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.