#29 Luke Leaman - Cardio for meatheads

20,614 words · 23 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction and Early Background

CHAPTER 02

Career Path and Poliquin Group

Yeah, so like you said, my name's Luke Lehman. I'm a Pisces. I like long walks on the beach and candlelight dinners and that type of shit. But yeah, look, I started in the industry, if you can say like two decades ago about. So I actually got into training when I was about eight years old. So since I come from Texas, you've got American football, gridiron football. and so we get started really early i come from a very small country town of less than 7 000 people so your options growing up was like because the only stuff we had to do in my hometown was like fuck and fight and drink and lift weights and play football that's if you've ever watched varsity blues which i was a stuntman in that is that is exactly like the town i come from where the athletes run everything and the town shuts down on friday night and all that type of stuff so I actually got into weights for that and because I was bullied a little bit when I was a kid. So like a lot of guys who go into things like bodybuilding and powerlifting and strongman, I lifted weights a lot to put on my gorilla suit because I figured the bigger and stronger I was, people would leave me alone. So that kind of got me started in the industry. And then I started, I found muscle media when I was like 12 or 13 years old, found Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, found all these guys that were saying things that made a lot of sense. And the only viewpoint I had for training was old Arnold books from the 70s that you'd find in the local library. And Frank Zane, like, were the real old shit that doesn't have a lot of science in it. So then you get these guys that are actually talking about Eastern Bloc methods and Russian methods and how the Chinese are training and how all this stuff is going on. I started getting really into that and then fast forward. And eventually I ended up working for Charles, um, as one of his proteges. And then I ended up kind of taking over his position at the company when he left. Then I left a couple of years after that, started muscle nerds. Um, and here I am somehow in Australia, married to a Kiwi. With three dog children. With what's that? With three dog children. With three dog children. You know, I've pretty much, I've pretty much got everything I was looking for out of life so far and I'm only 42 so I've got the fast car I wanted I always wanted a French bulldog and I wanted somebody I wanted to marry somebody with an accent so I pretty much got it all that's the trifecta I got it covered there's some like a good low-hanging fruit of things to get yeah that will give you then that sort of what someone with an accent in the dog lots of places well everyone has an accent when you're from Texas and living in Australia. This is true. This is true. But then he found a Kiwi. Yeah, that's so weird.

CHAPTER 03

Meeting Zoe and Relationship Story

You and Zoe met, I imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, at a gym or at some sort of educational course. At a course, yeah. So I was teaching for Policum Group in Sydney and she was one of the students. And I had just come off of probably one of the worst classes I'd ever taught. Not because I taught bad, because the students were terrible. like this was a PICP level one level two course where you're learning how to coach and how to train and they basically tore this guy facility to pieces like one kid got locked in the bathroom we had to kick the door in So Paul and group had to buy them a new door They started they were doing drop lunges off the guy plates and rubbed all the stickers off of his nice bumper plates One kid was doing we were doing assisted Nordic curls. And so I told the guys, I said, now the guys that are holding the ankles down, make sure you keep your head down in case something weird happens. kid had his head up uh the guy had 80 pounds on the bar he let go of the triceps rope and the uh triceps ball thing hit him right in the eye and he had to get like four stitches blood everywhere so i came off of that course going oh my god australians are the dumbest motherfuckers i've ever met in my life what in the fuck is wrong with these people so i walked into the next class which was teaching biosig and i said i hope you guys are smarter than those dumb motherfuckers from last weekend. And so that's kind of how I set the tone of the weekend. And so Zoe instantly did not like me. And, and, you know, I didn't, I didn't really notice her in class, she was there to learn. And when you go to some of these courses, you can tell like some of the girls, especially biosig, where people are getting half naked and pinching each other. There's people coming in and looking to hook up like people will actually do. Hey, Daisy, people will actually do contest prep for Biosig to look good, right? It's a weird culture, but Zoe comes in in like trackies and kind of like a... I'm convinced it was a side ponytail. She says she's never had one, but I'm convinced it was... She was... It was a real loose kind of three-quarter ponytail, like didn't wear any makeup. She wasn't there. She was there to learn, not for anything else. So I just kind of like glazed over her for whatever reason. And plus, I was still mad from the weekend before and those students. And then then I ended up coming up to Gold Coast and to stay with a friend of mine who is actually the guy who told her to do the course. I saw her post on someone's post. I thought she was funny. So as you do, I cyber stalker all of her social media. And I said, oh, man, I really want to meet this chick. So I texted her and I said, hey, you know, kind of slid into those DMs. And I said, hey, I'm here for three weeks. Will you go out with me? And she says, no, absolutely not. Just shut me down immediately. So I'm like, I'm going, are you kidding? Like, what's the deal? Let's talk this out. She's like, no, no, you don't remember me. You were my instructor last weekend for biosec. You're an arrogant prick and blah, blah, blah, blah. She actually sent, Polycom Group sent anonymous surveys, and she actually gave me a bad review. So, yeah, so, but I didn't let that stop me. I like a good challenge. So every day I dropped in her DMs and asked her out over and over and over and over, and I finally wore her down. Is that harassment? If anything, this is a testament to Luke's game and charisma. Oh, all right. I've got a tattoo here that says relentless. So it took me two weeks, convinced her to go out, and it was supposed to be just one, like just a date, kind of a, you know, we both knew what it was supposed to be. It was just going to be kind of like a hookup one-night stand type thing, and it ended up being a four-day date. And then two and a half months later, she sold her car, quit her two jobs, and flew to America and met me in Boston. And we've been together ever since. It's been five years now. I reckon the only kind of person that would have that sort of behavior would be a side ponytail wearing chick. There's no way she was a straight 180 with a normal ponytail. No one does that with a normal ponytail. Respect to Zoe for shutting you down and telling you you're a piece of shit when she thought it. I love that honesty. That is so good. I've also been houndering Zoe to come on the podcast too because Zoe's got a big brain and people need to know about Zoe. And now she's already featured. She doesn't even know it, but she's got a background feature. So she's on here now. she may as well come on and talk more shit later. I told her this morning, I said, I'm going to go ahead and tell them, I'm going to go ahead and commit you for next week. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'll, I'll, I'll do it myself. I'm like, all right, well let's, let's come on, let's get it going. Like she needs to get out there. People need to hear from her, man. She's got, she's got such a different perspective than a lot of the rest of us because she, she can't, she wasn't really a trainer. Like when I met her, she had been doing bootcamp stuff for a year and a half, two years. and she was done a couple of personal training sessions. So she's been able to see kind of both sides of being just a regular civilian versus actually being in the industry and then skyrocketing up in the industry to kind of that weird niches and seeing a weird pocket of the strength and conditioning industry

CHAPTER 04

Muscle Nerds Coaching Philosophy

Speaking of which just going from being a regular civilian to skyrocketing I understand that your main audience at Muscle Nerds is other coaches because you see how many bad coaches there are out there and how that has detrimental effects for the clients that put their trust in them. So you run some courses. I think you've got multiple going on right now. You've got a 10-week program design course, nutritional fundamentals course, and then you've got another one aimed at helping coaches understand how to coach online versus how to coach face-to-face. Did I get that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you did.

CHAPTER 05

Online vs. Face-to-Face Coaching

It's basically some of the stuff you wouldn't learn at a traditional course. and because I've taken over the last 20 years so many courses and I've delivered so many courses and I've seen so much content. So I'm always looking for putting something out that no one's put out before and where can we fill these holes where people aren't understanding this stuff. And one of the things, especially with client communication, like if I'm going to – people think, and you guys know because you're primarily online, people think that online training is easy. well if you're doing it right it's hard and it is very very time consuming it is much more time consuming than being in the gym um if you like being if you like a lot of admin work and you're great at communication and you want to be on sitting at your desk 12 hours 16 hours a day then online training is perfect for you if you're more of a people person and you need that personal like connection with people then you need to stay in the gym and stay offline because the online of markets getting super saturated. And so, and then people are devaluing the market by just selling stock standard crap programs and not actually giving the service. So we put out, we pulled a piece of our program design, the big course, we pulled it out and kind of revamped it a little bit and set it out of, this is how you need to communicate with your client. This is how like, this is like red flags you need to look for when you didn't know when something's out of your scope of practice when you need to what you can and can't do how to deliver the product different apps and things you can use staying in scope um and then things like check-ins how do you do your check-ins how do you structure your week right and so it's a part of the course that uh i had shane o'leary one of our coaches do because he's very very pedantic and he's very kind of operational i'm the worst one to do it like if you if you're a robot and you can i can hand you program and I don't have to see you for four weeks. I'm your coach because I can write you, I can write you a fucking bad-ass program to get results, but you got to be able to go execute it without a lot of input for me. I'm not a good communicator or, and I'm not a good hand holder. Right. So Shane's very good at that. So he wrote all that. So it's very good about opening communication and kind of the back and forth and what you should expect from your client, what they should expect from you and that, that type of thing. Right. Yeah. I love that. I I've done both i've been um a face-to-face trainer and then eventually moving online and i totally agree that it is harder online um because of the things that you mentioned like people can't just execute it without a lot of hand-holding or without a lot of queuing or picking up issues and whatever and it's more time consuming doing it online if you do it right because you need videos and then you need to type out a response or record a video and like there's all this back and forth and it's harder to communicate clearly when you're not with the person and i also found visual cues really helpful like you could say to someone anterior pelvic tilt and they're like hey but if you're there in person and you're just like sticking your ass out you're like anterior and then they get it from that visual you don't have that online so

CHAPTER 06

Low Standards in the Fitness Industry

i love that you're filling that gap and i think you're doing the industry a great service uh by helping trainers improve their standard because the standard is pretty fucking low in the industry generally i would say real fucking low i mean it's a very low barrier to entry thing like anyone can go get their training certification it's the cert three four so basic your grave your grandmother decided tomorrow that she wanted to train she could be a trainer within six weeks and she's never fucking lifted a weight in her life it's even worse in america where you can do a two-day course you can do a weekend course and be a trainer oh my god oh my god worse than that some people don't even need to do the little shitty course to call themselves a trainer because like there's not a lot of uh what's the word i'm looking for there's not a lot of um the barrier for entry is really low but you can just call yourself a trainer and someone's going to be like i'll hire you they're not going to ask you they're going to assume that you're qualified and you know what you're talking about I mean you see it in every segment of our industry too I remember you you you I like I started powerlifting when I was like 14 And I powerlifted for a long time And I got to what would be considered a pretty pretty probably the nowadays the lower end of what would be considered elite level powerlifting And it took me, you know, 13, 14, 15 years to get there. And so for me, everybody, I became a personal trainer when it wasn't cool to be a personal trainer. Like nobody was a personal trainer. That was my mom even said to me when I decided to become one, she goes, this is just going to be a hobby. You'll never make a career out of this. Right. And so like, that's how kind of taboo it was to teach people how to exercise. And there wasn't a big market for it. So then when everybody started doing it, I decided, you know what, well, I do strongman and I do powerlifting. And I've done that since I was 14. I'm going to call myself an S&C coach, because that's kind of what I do really. And I don't want to be a personal trainer. So then everybody started calling themselves an S&C coach. So you would get guys that were 65 a kilo soaking wet who couldn't fucking bench press the body weight they couldn't even squat their body weight and they would call themselves a strength and conditioning coach i'm like what kind of fuck it are you a strength and conditioning coach for toddlers because i don't understand like you're not fucking strong and you've never been strong like if you've never had if you've never had say 310 on your back trying to do a deep squat you can't possibly understand the difference between that and 150 like there's a massive difference between that being able to breathe being able to move like the mechanics completely changed so you know where you would like you and i all do now with the with like bodybuilding and stuff which i'm trying i'm like kind of getting away from that i can't i just can't do it anymore man i can't deal with all the mommy daddy issues and all that other shit um but like you'll get somebody who decided to do a show and they'll do a show in like fucking miles where there's like three contestants and they'll place because there were only three contestants so they'll be like oh i placed i placed third in my first show now i'm a competition coach and you're like you were the least shitty looking person on stage there was only three people there like you'll see people get there that you'll get your pro card by default because you were the best out of two like just it's just us our industry so it's so wacky man because you can basically do whatever the fuck you want to do. And unless you hurt someone, no one's ever going to do anything about it. Even if you do, we know plenty of people that have injured and harmed their clients in many ways. And what are the repercussions? Like most of the time there's not. There was a Sydney trainer that had a squat problem go viral. I can't remember who it is. But they basically had a dude back squatting outside of a safety cage in the middle of a fucking fitness first floor. He could barely stand with the weight on his back. And he's like, go on then. you can do this and he's he's personal trainers like spotting him and he crumbles forward drops the bar and then the personal trainer goes over his back like a jockey because he's getting pulled by the bar it went that motherfucker is still training people because i didn't realize who it was until like maybe like a year ago i saw him pop back up i was like oh he's still in the industry that's interesting like there's plenty of trainers trainers we shouldn't give them that title plenty of people that uh try and coach people um in federations that are untested and gear them to the fucking gills and their health and they do it with nutrition as well and girls just don't have their period for years on end or there's all these negative consequences that they didn't foresee happening and wouldn't have agreed to if they knew um and these these people just continue on like you wanted to do a competition you know

CHAPTER 07

Drug Use and Natural Competitions

yeah man the stories i could tell i remember being when I first kind of started training competitors, I remember being in San Antonio, Texas, and it was at a natural competition. The girl I was dating at the time, I was coaching her for it. And we're kind of like hanging around. And one of the competitors was on the phone and you could hear him talking to his coach like, oh my God, I got randomly drawn for drug testing. What do I do? And you can hear the coach basically going, abort, abort, abort. I can't, I can't let it, I can't have anybody know that I have you on gear while you're at a natural competition. It's like, bro, if you want to do drugs, there's plenty of competition for you. Like it's crazy to me. Yeah. Like I personally think that if you've ever done steroids, you shouldn't be able to do natural. Even if you haven't done gear for say seven years, it's still unfair because when you're on steroids, you build more mononuclei out there. There's things that you build that are long lasting that never go away. and so it's still an unfair advantage even if you take seven years off and you haven't taken gear in seven years you still should not be able to go on a natural competition. The official rules with bodybuilding at least in Natty comps is five years and we think that legally sure you're abiding by the rules but it's not really abiding by the spirit of the rules. We had

CHAPTER 08

BMI and Health Risks for Lifters

Getting hypertrophy to a human body, evolutionary speaking, is not natural. Your body doesn't want to get gigantic. That's why I've had this argument with people for years that BMI still matters, even if you're big and ripped and you think you're in shape. All right. And I've had this argument and last year, I think Luke Tolick sent me a, sent me a paper on it showing that people that are bigger, even if they're leaner, are still at a higher risk for mortality than people with a lower BMI. And part of it was, we can probably make a percentage where the BMI is probably a little bit too narrow. If you're lifting weights, maybe we, and it's not in your natural, we open that up a little bit. So for me, if you're in the overweight category and you're lifting weights, that's probably pretty good. But if you're in the obese category, because you're massive, because you're on a bunch of gear, you need to really have a coming to Jesus talk with yourself because I don't give a shit that you're fricking 6% body fat. If you're, if you're my height, if you're six foot tall and you're 124 kilos and you're 5% body fat and you're like, what's that, like 35, 36 BMI, you are increasing your risk for all cause mortality. I don't care that you think you're healthy and in shape because you're fucking oats and oatmeal every day. Let's break that down a little bit more because I think it is important. I've had the same argument, share the same opinion as you is that obviously the further you shift away from that sort of bell curve, central point of the bell curve for body weight that you are increasing the stresses of all cause mortality what are some of the things despite the fact that you may otherwise appear to look healthy or look lean and fit what are some of the problems that people need to be aware of with escalation of body weight irrespective of what that is

CHAPTER 09

Blood Pressure and Cardiovascular Conditioning

first thing is i mean number one is the blood pressure all right you got to keep that blood pressure in check and um you know how it is here in australia where it's hashtag fuck cardio The one tool that makes it the easiest, probably the most effective tool to drop your blood pressure other than assessing sodium-potassium balance, the best tool is stress management and cardiovascular conditioning. There's a lot of guys, especially the bigger guys, who would probably do really well if they would just do a couple of big blocks of conditioning before they begin prep. and don't use you instead of using cardio to chase calories initially do it for the adaptations on oxidation so that you you can eat more food during prep and you can oxidize more food faster you have more energy you can train you have better performance while you're in the middle of your prep so um you know people need to start thinking about what are the adaptations and what they're trying to do and most people use will use cardio for chasing calories when what we need to think about it is what adaptation am I looking to do, right? And that can have long-term effect. If I want to lower my blood pressure, the easiest way to do it is through aerobics. I mean, that's what we've found in changing the pliability and the elasticity of your vascular system and then changing the cardiac morphology so that you can perfuse more blood per pump instead of really thickening up that left ventricular wall and making it very inefficient for your heart to beat properly That one of the main ones

CHAPTER 10

Blood Markers and Kidney Health

Another one is looking at things like creatinine clearance So people with a lot more muscle tissues they going to create a lot more creatinine which means their their bone levels are going to be off So every time they go in, they're going to expect to show that they have, like their EGFR will typically be a little bit low. The bigger you are, that's pretty, pretty normal. So you want to, but you still need to keep that in check too, because there could be some type of, you know, kidney, chronic kidney disease type thing going on with people that they might not catch if they just assume that they have, you know, the 50 on their EGFR is okay. They really want to make sure that they're getting the rest of that stuff checked and look at their creatinine clearance, looking at their urea clearance and things like that to make sure that they don't have some hidden kidney issue that's being masked by total body mass or by total lean body mass i should say so essentially what he's saying is as lean body mass goes up some of those byproducts of that are going to show up in these blood panels as a potential negative absolutely they will use that then as an excuse to say my levels are fine it's because i'm massive yeah in actual fact we could have some underlying uh impacts or underlying effects going on at those those organs the filtration rate of the kidneys that they need to and you see it you see it the other way as well too like if you see people who have no like they're very skinny they may have really high egfr or filtration for their kidneys but they actually have chronic kidney disease and the only thing that's the reason they look so good on their labs is because they have no muscle and they don't eat a lot of protein so the more protein you eat and the more muscle you have and the more you train the more that's going to lower that value so that it's going to skew different values and you want to make sure that you're looking at trends across a long period of time to see to make sure that there's not some ticking time bomb and god forbid you end up having a stroke or a heart attack and and it just came out of nowhere you know and i'll say that like came out of nowhere well if fuck man if you're using three grams of gear a week and you've been doing that for five years and your blood pressure is 168 over 102 it didn't just come out of nowhere like it just it your body just finally got to a point where it couldn't compensate anymore and the compensation was I'll just shut down. Ironically, people look at really big dudes that are really lean. And when they have no idea what they're talking about, they go, well, they're so fit. They're so healthy. Oh my God. That heart attack came out of nowhere. How most the healthiest person that I know suffer from this, but like really there's just a misunderstanding going on.

CHAPTER 11

Personal Health Scare and Metabolic Syndrome

There's a misunderstanding of what, like you've got, you've got healthy and you've got fit. then you've also got obviously unhealthy and unfit and then you've got the way someone looks and the way someone looks is not truly indicative of how fit they are right when i first when i first started teaching bioseg like full-time and i moved to rhode island um i wasn't feeling right i looked fine i had abs i had you know cephalic vein abs everything i fucking i was still swatting like 600 pounds and i was still you know i was still a unit and i i but i didn't feel right like I wanted to cry after sex and I actually would cry after I masturbated. That was really weird. That's because you're not good at it. And then I'd do it and I'd cuddle myself, you know, and, you know, just there was something I was sad and depressed and there was something not right. So I had, I was like, man, there's got to be something wrong with my testosterone. So sure as shit, I go to the doctor and low testosterone, high estradiol. But, you know, that was all an effect of a higher order thing. So I had all these issues with metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, my fucking triglycerides were like 399. They should be well under 99. My LDL was high. My bloods looked like somebody who was getting ready for a contest prep, and I was not taking anything at all. It was just basically stress and overdoing things. And I had to finally say, shit, man, I got to get my shit together. Like you can't see health. You can only measure health and make assumptions if you're getting the right types of labs and metrics like taking heart rate and measuring heart rate variability and heart rate and measuring things like blood pressure and keeping tabs on all that stuff. Yeah, I think you definitely can't see it, but you absolutely can feel it. and the issue with uh the group of individuals we've been referencing here high bmi as a result of lean body mass is that there's cognitive dissonance associated with they want to look a particular way so they take particular things to achieve that it's it's above what they're naturally capable of and they do not want to recognize the way they truly feel yeah rather they just want to express how they think people think they feel by how they look yeah

CHAPTER 12

Psychology of Exercise Dependence

this isn't limited to just people who take steroids though I know plenty of boys and girls who are natural but they have a huge exercise dependence They you know they have orthorexia They think they eating right because they only eating clean foods or whatever, but the relationship with food is so poor. Their social life is suffering because they're so obsessed with exercise and eating well, and their health just isn't what it should be. But because they are putting so much energy into it, they think it must be good. But really they could be doing themselves a disservice because like where's room for balance then yeah there's room for de-stressing or least mode yeah yeah you know you see those those girls and they'll go i don't they'll look at you and they'll tell you straight up i don't know how girls don't eat i don't know how girls can be anorexic and you're like but you're training like 30 hours a week do you not understand like that's the same thing and you're you're only eating like 1200 calories a day and you're training like 21 to 24 hours a week like do you not understand like you are anorexic you're just using exercise to as the you know not eating anything thing and they're like what i'm like yeah you're fucked up like then you got you got shit and we all do and especially in our industry we're all fucked up like that's why the majority of us got into the industry it's always at least us us guys that have been in it for a while we got into the industry to help people and we love what we do nowadays people get in the industry because i think they're going to make you know seven figures naked because i've been sold a bunch of bullshit but a lot of us got in the industry to help other people because we didn't know how to help ourselves so that became our addiction is transforming people's bodies and their lives and getting them stronger winning contests and that's the way we kind of patted ourselves on the back and kind of had pain avoidance from maybe early childhood issues or even adult trauma and things like that.

CHAPTER 13

Childhood Trauma and Motivation

Mine was something my mother said to me, which a long time, that same thing where she said, well, this will be a hobby that you'll never make a career out of this. That's my mommy issue thing. And it seems like such a stupid thing to hold on to. But when you're really passionate about something and you're like 19 or 20 years old and for somebody to, you've got a long, I mean, you're looking at like 60 to 70 more years of life. And when you're like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And then your parents, someone in authority that's always been there for you, shoot you down, man, I don't really fuck you up. Right. And, uh, when I was a little kid, I was, I was an eighties kid. So I was into Kung Fu and ninjutsu and all this stuff because of Bruce Lee and all that stuff. So I did a lot of martial arts and I was told at home that if you use this on anyone defending yourselves, you're going to get it worse when you get home. So I know how to kick people's asses, but I had to let myself get my ass kicked all the time because I knew if I got in trouble at school for knocking somebody out, I'd get in trouble at home even worse. So I ended up, you know, starting to bash the weights because I thought, man, if I get real fucking big, nobody's going to mess with me. And then when I got to college, I realized that drunk dudes love to mess with big guys. Yeah, that's the truth. And then he gets you in a lot of fucking trouble when you're 124 kilos and some tiny little guy's fucking with you because he's got a little bit too much liquid confidence in him. Yeah, it's a weird thing. There's almost like there's a bro code and then there's an anti-bro code. The bro code is like you walk past a big guy and they look at you and they're like, they give you a nod like, you and me, bro. And I'm like, no, not really. But sure. And then the opposite of that is like I say this to Liz, like I just want to walk the beach with my shirt off because I wouldn't mind getting some sun. Yeah. but I know for certain people are like, look at that fuckwit, you know, whereas some fat dude or some super skinny dude can walk the beach freely and everyone's just like, good on them, man. They don't even become noticeable. It's super weird. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like, um, I mean, I won't even, if, if I'm not in, if I can't see like at least, at least four abs, if I'm not at least 15% body fat, I won't take my shirt off at the beach. I'm like, I'm good. I'm good. I don't want to get chafed, man. And I don't want to get fined, you know? I'm so safe.

CHAPTER 14

The Bro Code Stories

You know, there has been a couple of times that the bro code has really saved me, especially in Texas. And I'll tell you two. One, I probably shouldn't because, well, I was doing illegal things both times. So one day I was driving. I had a sports car at the time, and I was in Dallas, Texas on Interstate 35. And I was going, I think the speed limit was something like 65 miles an hour. And I think I was going about 120. And so I got pulled over. I was trying to get to the bar to get one last drink with my buddies before last call. It's a very, very smart way of doing it. But I was like fucking 22. And I got pulled over. And I got pulled over by a Texas Highway Patrol guy. So the Highway Patrol in Texas those guys don fuck around Like you don get warnings with them You get tickets or you go to jail or whatever So I remember the guy steps out of his car and it this big black cowboy And he's got his Stetson on and his boots, and he walks over. And the guy's massive. He's probably got like 20-inch arms. And he looks at me, and he goes, why are you speeding? I go, man, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm just trying to get to the bar to have one last drink. and I was pretty decently big. So he kind of looks at me. I kind of look at him and he nods. He goes, all right, slow it down. I'll see you later. That was it. That was it. But it was a bro code moment, right? Because, you know, you're a lifter. I'm a lifter. Okay, we're in this together. Because they would never, never let you off. The second time is I was passing over the Mexican border with a bunch of drugs on me. So I had gone to Mexico and I packed my crotch with Sustanon and veterinary D-ball and Clomid and all this shit. And I'm standing there and I'm shitting my pants because I've got like $2,000 worth of steroids strapped to the inside of my legs. And this was all for me, right? This was going to carry me through the next year. So I wasn't like drug trafficking. to sell to people. This was for my own personal shit. I'm standing there and I'm in line to walk back across and I'm shitting bricks. I'm like, if I get caught with this, I'm fucked. I'm fucked. But again, early 20s, you don't understand consequences in your early 20s. I look up and the guy, the Border Patrol guy looks at me. We lock eyes. Big, massive dude all roided up. I'm looking to him big massive dude all roided up with two thousand dollars with the roids in my crotch he kind of gives me a wink and a nod grabs the two little frat boys in front of me says get on the line come over here we got to check you and sir you come on through and i was like yeah so there are times when the bro code is we're good we're glad to have the bro code right he's like i know why you're crossing this border i cross it also 100 percent

CHAPTER 15

Benefits of Cardiorespiratory Training

I think the biggest thing that I've noticed with individuals that go to your courses and all the rest of it is that it's a twofold thing. One, they enjoy the stories. You're a charismatic dude. You have great delivery. But secondly, it's because we've talked about trainers in the start of this podcast and how people fuck it up all the time. And I think they fuck it up because they work at a surface level understanding of what they're doing. And they're essentially just regurgitating shit they've seen. Yeah. They take the protocol. They don't reinvent it. They don't understand it. They just give it to the person to follow up. You're more of a ground up kind of guy. And you teach from the bottom up, which I think is really cool. So I think in light of us talking about the BMI and now the cardio, this has been a really interesting time with this COVID-19. We'll release this during this time of people still being away, where I've said to a lot of my clients, this is probably a blessing in disguise because it forces you out of your current behaviors of only weight training and it forces you into potential fear points like doing some cardio respiratory or cardiovascular dominant training so for those that need to understand what this is all about the benefits of cardio respiratory training and then how that transfers potentially even into muscle growth and how it supports it and it's not perhaps anti it could you break down like what cardio respiratory training actually is and how we can go about it and why people might one to actually consider. Yeah. So, and that's the thing, it's such a broad topic. Like if you go into a room of a hundred coaches and you say, all right, we're going to talk about cardio. They immediately think about, oh, I'm going to burn calories. And I, I still use, I still use, uh, Broderick's that little rant he did that last time he was in Brisbane. I remember sitting in the back of the room and, uh, he was asked about do your cardio rant. And now I'm now keep in mind, I'm looking at this guy and I'm looking at him hobbling around on stage, power lifter, half crippled. I'm convinced. And I'm the dude in the room that's known as like, kind of like the Brisbane cardio guy, even though I'm not, you know, but we've been told, we've talked about it so much over the last five years because no one's doing it. They just, they're like, just do your weightlifting. Great. That's cool. But if you want to be healthy, why don't we need a little bit of this as well? Right? So I'm sitting there and I'm shitting, bricks because I don't know what he's going to say and I'm thinking he's going to say something that we're going to end up getting into some type of battle. Then he actually just surprised the shit out of me by going on a rant about, stop calling it cardio because semantics matter. Call it cardiovascular respiratory training and that's what keeps your body alive. You know what's bad for performance? Dying. I just lost it and I went, that's when I became a Broderick fan. When he did that, we

CHAPTER 16

Scientific Method and Falsification

I hope so because that's a sign of progress, isn't it? Yeah. But also the cool thing about I think individuals that take the time to become more educated in the baseline stuff and build from the ground up like we were talking about before is you never really ever talk in absolutes. No. This is indicating. This suggests. This suggests. This may be the case. I think this is the best based on the current. It's likely to be. So you never actually feel like you can't go back on what you said because you're like, guess what? I learnt some more shit, you know? And back then I said it was probably the best. Now I'm saying this might be the best. whereas people that are just like no no you you only do this very dogmatic yeah that means they have to go back on their own like their own concepts i think too i think that like um something that jackson poe said to me because i do occasionally i do like consults with him on how to research right i mean who who better to do it than a meathead that uh is into the same type of shit that i'm into who also is a phd candidate so you know it's probably the best person look at or PhD. So something that he told me, he said, Luke, he goes, I want you to understand what research is. He goes, research is not there to prove anything. It's only there to falsify things. And I went, huh? He goes, yeah. He goes, we can't prove shit. He goes, if somebody says we've proven this, we've proven that he goes, they're full of shit. All we use that to is to test against stuff that we see empirically. And to say, whether if what we, if our understanding of this is close or not. And I went, man, that's a really good way of thinking about it. So then ever since then, I've always said, like, this is what the, like you said, this is what the research indicates, you know, this is inconclusive, but it looks like it's probably going to be like this. But we can't prove anything. Or if I have a theory or a hypothesis of something, and I'll tell people, like, I can't, I'm gonna, I'm pulling this out of my ass, I'm going to be straightforward with you. I cannot find this in the literature, but looking at the biochemistry and looking at the physiology of it, this looks like it makes sense. So I'm just going to tell you to just keep that in mind that this might be the way this works, but I can't prove it yet. I can't find anything that anybody agrees with me on what's going on here, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's certainly validity and value and weight in empirical evidence. yeah uh what there isn't waiting is is suggesting that you know why like you've just said you know that's the problem because that's when we start to get that typical dogma so we start to get people saying oh this is the only way you know and preaching shit as opposed to just saying that's what i'm what i'm seeing yeah i think what people need to is they need to have um they need to have a peanut gallery of colleagues that can tell them when they're full of shit or to go against like for me, one of my guys is Dr. Mike T. Nelson. Like he's a very good personal friend of mine. And I was actually listening to a couple of his podcasts this morning where he mentioned some talks that he and I had where we were talking about things like hydrogen ions and lactate and why someone would have high serum lactate, how that refers back to metabolic inflexibility. And we kind of both came to the same conclusion. We were talking it out. And there's a lot of times where I'll tell him like, Hey, I've got this idea, blah, blah. And you know, he'll look at me and goes, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. However, and then he'll throw like 10 papers at me. And then I look at it and I'm like, fuck, now I'm back at square one. All right. So, you know, if you have to be willing to eat a piece of humble pie and just say, okay, what I thought I knew or what I thought I figured out, um, isn't exactly how that works. And I have to be able to go back and tell people, especially if I teach it in one of my classes, I have to be able to go back and say, Hey, remember this, what I taught you? That's not actually how it works. I'm really sorry for teaching it to you that way that's how i thought it worked at the time but i've actually found something that works better or found it worked differently yeah i think that attitude is so supportive of the scientific method um because when people have dogmatic views they kind of put themselves on a team right and so even if like your football team is losing you're still going to bat for that team you're still going to support them you're not going to halfway through the game switch your hat from blue to red whatever yeah um but but when we have that attitude of this seems to be the case and then evidence comes out to kind of contradict that you're like oh well maybe this is more likely and then that's how science pushes forward and that's how we progress so i think that's that's really important for the health of progress generally yeah in science yeah appreciate

CHAPTER 17

Informed Eating and Exit Strategies

i think that the result exists but we perhaps don't know the method as to why it does occur uh funnily enough you mentioning jackson it's the perfect example of that is that that we have been implementing these refeeds and intermittent dieting strategies and potential diet breaks. Which he's researching for those of you that don't know. Yeah, these high calorie days within a fat loss target for the long term. And there's always been ideas around why it works or why the result perhaps is better, but there is a fucking mess of data in regards to what the actual truth is Yeah Even he alluding to any he annoyed us with illusion alluding to like well my data doesn really go alongside what I thought was I thought was going to be the reason or like what was actually improving these strategies. So, well, when we spoke to Jackson, his paper was not yet finalized or conclusive or whatever. We were sort of talking to him just after he finished collecting the data and he was just going through the process of analyzing it. um and trying to piece it together so maybe he's made more progress since then i'm not sure yeah it's due for july but i think it was the same thing can't wait yeah he was alluding to like the result is probably in line with what we would expect but the reasons and some of the the stuff within that he expected to see with performance and high carbohydrate dieting uh intermittently didn't align and it surprised him and i was like fuck man like this is just going to make it more confusing again yeah i mean i've got my ideas around some of this stuff with continuous versus intermittent dieting and things like that. And like, I know his mentor did the Matador's diet and a lot of coaches will fill the matter or diet out. I think it was a stupid fucking study. I'm just going to say that. And I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with what we do. It was obese people that weren't training has nothing to do with anybody. If I have, if I have somebody who's morbidly obese and they come to me and they're like, I'm, I can walk and that's all I'm going to do. Great. That works well. But my clients all train four or five days a week with weights and they do like three or four conditioning sessions a week. To me, it's not a good example to throw out for your argument around intermittent dieting. I honestly don't think that continuous dieting, if you match the calories over the, say, six months, I don't think it really matters if you do continuous or in a minute, as long as the continuous diet isn't a massive calorie deficit. Stop dieting people on 40% deficit and thinking you're going to be able to sustain that for six months. It's fucking retarded. If you want to do that, give them diet breaks. But to me, I have to talk to my clients and say, okay, you guys have had your eyes checked before, right? And they go, which is more clear, lens A or lens B? Okay, then what about this one, lens A or lens B? Lens A or lens B? And you go through all these different lenses till you find the one that makes you see the most clearly. And that's how I look at like diet and training. I'm like, okay, what makes, what sounds better to you that you just under eat a little bit and you're never really that hungry, but you're a tiny bit hungry or you're real fucking hungry for two weeks, but you know, you get to eat a lot for two days, you know, depending on what they want. That's what I'm going to put them on and depending on what they can be complying on. but I don't, as long as the, as long as the calories are matched, I don't think it's that going to be that big of a deal, but who fucking knows I'm also a fucking college dropout. So who gives a shit? Well, we have a really thorough questionnaire and consultation process with our clients to figure out what does fit you best. Cause we don't have one way that's best. What's best is what works for the client. So that's why we ask a lot of annoying questions, which takes a little bit more time than just like, here's this program for $49.95, off you go. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty similar to you, Luke, in that I don't really think there's a hell of a lot going on, like positively from a physiological point of view from intermittent versus continuous. I likely just think that it's mainly about managing the entire ecosystem of the individual with food and social interaction and like an all-encompassing holistic approach as as uh yogary is what people may think holistic is it really isn't um and that compliance factor is likely the biggest driver here of yeah success both in athletic development uh but obviously also in managing long-term weight loss clients because that's where this industry has failed miserably uh because we haven't got management systems in play to make this more sustainable because we do still have a lot of individuals that are saying this is how you lose weight and no one's really teaching the whys the hows and the management systems yeah and i think that's something i've been actually been working on on my whiteboard back here on some systems of how to initiate a diet then how to get through the middle of it and then kind of the exit strategy and one of the one of the quotes that i got from somebody who i've always had a lot of respect for which is dr not dr johnny balton who's a PhD in nutrition. He says that you should make like the weight loss journey should be like driver's ed for the maintenance. So it should be you're teaching them that this is how you're living for the rest of your life. So we need to find something that you can live with. It doesn't suck. And then understand that you know sometimes you need to speed on the highway but you don do that a lot or you get caught So if you going to overeat a little bit and speed on the highway that all right Just make sure it not enough to get caught And the majority of the time you need to make sure you make a full stop and you turn right and use your indicators and that type of thing. So they should be getting educated through this process that there is no end to what you're doing right now. there was a beginning but this is how you need to be doing for the rest of your life if you want to stay the way you know the way you want to look you know and then at least for the gen pop i mean we know with physique stuff it's a little bit different because you're going to to get to extremely low levels of uh of lean body mass you're going to have to do very extreme things that aren't particularly healthy um so but you which means you need an even bigger emphasis on exit strategy for that type of stuff. For sure. Right now, me and coach Shannon are working on a post comp prep program to help people organize their exit strategy and kind of understand where the pitfalls are. But Shannon actually wrote a book on this subject called Life After Dieting, a guide to informed eating. And we coined the term informed eating, meaning using the dieting process to be informed with nutrition, what your body needs, how you can get there, what works for or it doesn't work for you. And then we put away the food diaries. We put away like all the numerical data, the food scales, and then we just practice those habits that we've built up and using your informed decisions to eat for the rest of your life. So if anyone's interested in that book, Life After Dieting. Because it's for sure the hardest thing. The people that have tracked to learn generally hit a, you know, a big hurdle where they then don't know how to not track. they lose things they lose interoceptive feedback and awareness they don't understand mindfulness it's now just become a calculated game and that's what that whole thing is designed around is trying to manage the exit so that it becomes sustainable for life it's um life after there is a life after you see i like i actually i love to track my food which is a weird thing to say because for me, it gives me a feeling of power and control, and it keeps me on track. And, you know, some people might say, well, that sounds like an eating disorder. Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like I'm not using tracking for dieting. I just track all the time because I like data. So I want to see if I eat 3,000 calories, what does that do to my body? If I eat keto, what does that do to my body? If I eat high carb, because I've been playing with this shit for shit, man, since I was 18 years old. What's the best diet then, Luke? You know, the best diet is one that allows you to not binge and get the best results. For me, I'll tell you,

CHAPTER 18

Intuitive Eating vs. Informed Competence

for me, it is a lower-carb diet. And then maybe like some cyclical refeeds and things like that works really well for me. And, you know, like you were saying, Dean, earlier about like how people feel. Like I can feel because I use performance as a factor. So if I'm doing Brazilian jujitsu, which is kind of my new love, if I go low carb for a few days, I know that on about day four, I know I'm going to start doing the Ricky Bobby thing. Like, I don't know what to do with my hands thing. And I can tell because I'm on the mat and I'm like, I'm getting destroyed and I have no wind. That's when I know I need a refeed. Like, and so it, but to be able to, to be able to eat like that means that you have a very high level of subconscious competence and you have a very high intuition towards eating. This is what drives me crazy with all these intuitive eaters these days, the anti-diet culture. It's all intuitive eating. It's like, listen, motherfucker, if you don't know how food works, you can't be intuitive. Like, because if you're intuitive, you intuitively want to put a fucking hamburger and a pizza down your fucking gullet, you know? So you have to go for a period of time somehow tracking something, whether that's taking pictures for your coach, whether that's using your hands, whether that's using a scale, and then learning how to balance out a plate, that type of thing. I mean, it's very true. The intuitive eating and all the rest of it is still the same now as like every other strategy of food management or food psychological management is a misalignment with the true roots of where it comes from, which is actually why we coined the term informed because we do come from a tracking background and then we're saying consciously be aware and be intentional in your decisions. And you're doing that through the education and through the learning that you've gone through to know about food. Whereas actual intuitive eating, trademarked version, very different, but we have a bunch of people out there that are, again, just taking what they see as a protocol and going, this is what you should do, and fucking it up for everybody. Well, intuitive eating, I think, is very confused because people think it's another way to digest

CHAPTER 19

Critique of RPE and RIR

It's like if it fits your macros and flexible dieting first came out, then everybody was just trying to fit whatever the fuck they could in there. And for weight gain and weight loss, that works. That does work. It's just it might not be the healthiest thing. And then everybody got into the good foods versus bad foods. Like this is like the superpowers fighting each other or whatever. fucking the cold war and russia and the u.s or whatever it's like we got into these demonizing all these foods and i'm like look man i mean like you're getting something you're getting something out of the food right like so like you're looking at like six basic nutrients that you need every day like even if i'm eating donuts i'm still getting some protein carbs and fats and water and maybe even a tiny little bit of fiber so i'm covering like i'm covering like four of those essential nutrients right so it's more more to the saying of like beneficial more beneficial versus less beneficial sources of energy right which is kind of what we're looking for right but there's a man there's a lot of crazy marketing shit that i can't stand in the industry like with a nutrition some of that stuff we've been talking about with weight lifting for me it's fucking reps and reserve and rpe i can't fucking stand it i can't fucking stand it because most people that you train haven't trained long enough or intensely enough to even understand what a fucking 10 rpe is or how many reps they have left in reserve until you squat into the point where you fall now that's there you just hit a 10 right most people have never gotten there so we'll we use different things for that structure but i i'm gonna go insane if i see one more fucking person post about reps in reserve or rpe and the majority of the people who are posting about it are people who are already very well seasoned lifters but for me it's like that's doing a disservice to the people who need our help the most which are people who can barely chew and walk gum and don't know how to squat correctly man it is true like you got time and a place yeah like where where that uh rir came from is from a very iq driven cerebral lifter in in mike you know like yeah gets it because he's come through college performance and he knows what that... Talking about Mike Israetel. He knows what the folded squat feels like because he's done it multiple times. I like RP and RR if it's appropriately implemented. It can be a really good strategy, but I'm also dealing with people that are, again, very mentally attuned to how they feel and what failure is like. I can tell you right now, if us three went to the gym and we were all training, we could all probably watch each other look and go, you've got two more reps left. Right. We can probably, like, I can watch somebody warm up and I know, I know what their one or a max is going to be while I watch them warm up. Like I know I can calculate all this shit because I've spent two decades doing it. Like you guys too. Right. And you guys know, like you're lifting, you're like, all right, I got one and like three eighths of one left. And you're like, you get that one and you go, Oh yeah, there you go. So I got one on a partial, but yeah, most people we're, we're not the norm we're the outliers we're the we're the 15 percent way out there on the on the extreme side of the bell curve right it is true it's very hard to um to verbalize my warm-up to achieve my working weight to people like i do 25 of something then i do 10 then i do two then i do two then i do one and as i'm doing that i'm essentially using you know how that tension and weight feels to calculate how many more kilos I can put on to achieve a given amount of reps that's nine reps away from my current weight. Oh, that's hard to coach. You know? And they're like, what? Like, you mean there's no method? And I'm like, well, no, I'm getting feedback. I'm sensing, you know, feedback. Yeah. Plugging that into the calculator that is the brain. And that is true. That only comes with it.

CHAPTER 20

Warm-up Strategies and Potentiation

See, for me, because I was a power lifter before I did any type of physique stuff. So for me, everything's all mathematics. it's all a numbers game so for me it's like that just so that the people listening can understand the mentality of like warm-ups between two different high-level coaches for me it's like 50 for five 60 for five 70 for four 80 for three then i might do a couple of 90 at like one or two reps And then I jump into my first work set Or if I doing I may even do some post tannic facilitation or potentiation by I might actually warm up to over my work weight. So I might actually work up to 110% over what my first work set is going to be. So then when I go to my work set, my nervous system is ramped up. I tend to be a really fast twitch, high nervous system dominant, like strength athlete. So it takes me a long time to get the nervous system to wake up. But you're pyramiding your weight and reps, right? So if you're doing 110% for five reps, your working set will be like eight or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So if, let's say, let's say if I'm benching, say one, I'm going to bench say like one. 180. I think it was 180. 180. I wish I was, I could still do 180. Let's say I do 120 for a set of five. I might work up to like 127 and a half. And then I'd give myself like eight or nine minutes of rest, and then I'd begin the warm-up. Right. And you just do like a single or a double? No, for that warm-up, yeah, just a single, just a single. You know, I've thought about playing around with really super max, like seeing what would happen if I – because I've got weight releasers. what would happen if I did like a 10 second 140 percent super max eccentric and then gave myself like 15 minutes and then worked out and see what happened but I haven't got I don't have the nuts to do it yet I'm still too scared to do it so please film it yeah it's a really interesting concept that I've certainly um found it to be something I've enjoyed I used to do it back in the day with pressing off a pause work up to a heavy above the working on a pause and then put it on like normal and then use some recall and a lighter weight and it's just like fuck man is there a rubber band attached to this yeah but i'm also like you though i can only kind of do that a couple of times and then i just gas out i'm 100 like a sprint and drop guy like man if you're training hard you need all of that rest because some people might be listening to you saying five or six minutes rest, eight or nine minutes rest and thinking, what the fuck? I have a client who emailed me less than a week ago and she said, Oh, just so you know, in between sets, I've been skipping with my skipping rope to keep my heart rate up. I know that's just kind of how I felt. And I had to kind of break down why we need that rest and why it's so important. Um, and I, can we break that down right now? Sure. Do you want to, do you want to unravel that a little? Yeah, look, um so you've got different systems that you need to rest right so you've got metabolic systems and you've got neurological systems okay so those are the two main things you're thinking about so the higher reps you do you're thinking more metabolic things so we're recycling atp the body's energy currency so when you're doing lower reps you have to replenish more it's more creatine phosphate but that that doesn't really it doesn't take that long to replenish that because it never really breaks down below you know 50 60 percent so um you know you're talking like two to three minutes you've you've pretty much topped up about 90 of your creatine phosphate right so i like to do i almost always do antagonistic pairings so i'm either going to do like a push with a pull or a squat with a knee flexion or upper lower so i might do a squat with pull up so that you get actually get almost complete as much as you can recover from creatine phosphate. But when you're doing the really high rep, the really low reps, despite the energy flux that you're trying to manage, the energy substrate, you're also trying to manage your nervous system. So you're looking at, like, I've got to manage central and peripheral fatigue via my brain going, okay, what the fuck is this guy doing? Holy shit. Your brain doesn't know that you're doing this to get a 200-kilo squat. Your brain thinks you're wrestling a fucking gorilla, right? So your brain is going to limit your body from doing things that you're doing so that you don't hurt yourself, right? Which is like when we look into things like different forms of maximal strength, or we might be talking about absolute strength and relative strength, and then the one that a lot of people don't talk about, which is limit strength, which is that the strength you can't really tap into consciously. That's the story of the grandmother pulling the call off of her kid and then ripping every tendon off of her bone. That's that strength that, you know, you're basically your GTOs and some of your organelles will, will control that so that you can only contract your muscles at a certain amount because any more than this might lead to injury. Like, like I said, like ripping a muscle or ripping a tendon. But the closer you are to that, the more rest you're going to need to allow the nervous system to calm down enough to then potentiate another reaction in the muscle or another contraction And then there some other things going on Like if you looking at more peripheral fatigue you looking more thinking about like a single choline release from the end of an axon. You're thinking about calcium and the relationship between calcium and phosphate. Okay. And how fast calcium is being recycled through circa between the sarcoplasmic interplasmic reticulum. I'm sorry. I need some more coffee now. Shit. and the tropomyosin or the troponin, right? So there's a lot of things going on peripherally that we have to manage. pH level from hydrogen ions, excessive amounts of phosphate binding to calcium, inability to recycle acetylcholine. So that's from a chemical side and an electrochemical side, but then you've also got the brain portion too that you have to recover from, which is, you know, that can take eight minutes if you're doing a really, really heavy lift. if you're doing something super maximal there's a reason why power lifters think right now that quarantine is just a rest period for them right so that's the thing like they rest a lot because you need that and the stronger you get the more rest you need it was difficult explaining the ins and outs of that in an email to a gen pop client um especially if you explain it like i just did yeah there was a lot of like three syllable and above words there um i i basically just said to her, you're not just trying to keep your heart rate up to burn X amount of calories within a session. If you were skipping between sets, it would be helpful to be burning more calories. We're using that rest period so that you can repeat your performance. And what if you're not resting between sets, your performance is going to go down. And we know that there's a really strong relationship between performance and muscle growth. So yeah, I kind of wrapped it up in a really pedestrian bow. I mean, what they what they have to understand is like you're looking at, okay, you've got these switches in the body, and depending on what you do, they turn switches on or they turn switches off. It's just like a light switch. So if I'm doing weightlifting, the goal is to increase mechanical tension. The goal is to increase some metabolic fatigue and metabolic waste buildup and build inflammation that I then have to recover from. And most of that, for most things that you would be doing for your clients, most of that would be anaerobic in nature, correct? Because what is the outcome of what we're doing is I'm wanting to build more muscle, and then I'm probably going to want to get stronger because I'm putting on more cross-sectional muscle mass. That's fantastic. In order to do that, we need to do the things that cause the adaptations and the switches to be turned on for that. And if you're skipping in between lifting, you're impairing your ability to switch those, to turn those switches on harder. Right? So your results are going to be subpar. So you can skip. I like that. But we're going to skip in a separate session. yeah we might skip before you work out we might do skipping as a warm-up or something like that or we might just do it as a separate session but you're you're i would be embarrassed if one of my clients was that person that was doing a leg extension and then skipping next to the leg extension you always see them but they're still not as bad as the guys who shadow box on the gym for oh my god i love these guys are the worst i know yeah i um i've likened the switch for so many different analogies but uh

CHAPTER 21

Aerobic Base for Strength Athletes

i think in this instance we could say that uh if you try and skip in between what you end up doing is pausing the switch of training and it sits in a constant flicker like you never turn the light on you never let it turn off you just fuck with the switch and mess with the electrical power and may as well do a boot camp yeah you're just you're just sitting in neutral you can't see properly you're probably going to have a stroke because of because of the seizure that you're going to get from the light switch that's flicking on and off but and one other thing that you said there luke that that training is all anaerobic dominant which is true uh and i went on about this the other day on my social and that is that you require an aerobic base in order to maximize anaerobic potential which is another reason why all the big buffets out there should do a little bit of typical aerobic based training yeah well you know just going off the back of that you think about where do we get most of our strength and conditioning information it's like who who's probably this is without a doubt the person who's had the majority of the influence on most of what we've done with strength and conditioning it's not naming hay how for cardio no i don't know it's going to be arnold if you look at bodybuilding it's going to be arnold and if you look at snc you gotta you gotta mention charles paul yeah that's a fact like where do you agree with everything like he and I had our disagreements and you know we had our friendship and then we had our issues toward the end but I know thousands of coaches who wouldn be doing this if it hadn been for his influence right I forgot where I was going with that Like he was one of the guys that was very anti right And unfortunately, he passed away, you know, recently within the last, like, I think it was last year or the year before from a heart attack, a stirred heart attack. And he and I used to have a conversation. He was young, too. What was he, like? 50, maybe? Yeah, like 40s? 54, 55. I can't remember anymore, but, um, you know, we, we had our disagreements on doing the cardiovascular work and, uh, you know, that you just, the whole thing was just get stronger. And it was all based on, um, a professor and I, I, his last name's always fucks me up, but professor Dietmar Schmidt, it's like Schmidt lecture. I don't fucking, I don't know. There's too many fucking consonants, not in the vowels. Right. So he's a, he's a professor and he talks mainly about like speed and power development, right. And athletic development. And he has a quote that Charles loved to quote, which was strength is the mother of all qualities. Okay. I get that. If we're talking about speed and power production, absolutely. So, but, but just getting stronger is not going to make you a better athlete, right? If you're, if you're bodybuilding and we'll use athlete tongue in cheek with body builders no we never call it that so yeah we're not it's not we're we're building a beauty pageant yeah that's it we're physique artists right we're physique sculptors but um they're competing in the hunger olympics there you go yeah yeah who can do who can who can handle the most work on the least amount of food for the longest period of time it is it's like the survivor tank it's like at wit at last outplay except all you do is just outlast that's it uh but like if you look at like when you're looking at like speed and power yeah you you need you have to have a certain base level of strength to then express that strength in a time domain of velocity and power and all that type of thing and acceleration um but you still have to be able to produce that repeatedly over and over and over if you're an mma and you're a conor mcgregor and your shoulders are gassed by the second middle of the second round you got another three and a half rounds to go this is not going to be a good time for you right because you're deconditioned globally and locally so i came up with to counteract that i came up with one that where i say aerobics is the mother of all conditioning qualities right you're as my wife is uh off to say the aerobic system is your pathway for life. So why would you not want to make that as robust as possible? Like that's what helps keep everything running really nicely. Um, and that potentiates your anaerobic work. So if I have a broad aerobic base, my anaerobic work is going to be much better and it's much more repeatable and I don't need as much rest to do it, which means what's the, what's the key, one of the key tenants of fat loss density i can build more density i can do giant sets and i'm not getting tired i can do drone to eight by eight and i'm not getting tired i'm just fucking cranking out work output over time well i can only do that if i'm in shape if i'm not in shape i can't do that and then secondary to that too like in in the rest phase you you've got a higher affinity to beta oxidation more fat loss like yeah it's just so many wins to having a solid aerobic base but I just think there's, again, like a lot of dogma and a lot of fear behind because everybody just fucking puts up the picture of the marathon runner and goes, this is what it looks like when you run. And then they put up like the rock and go, this is what it looks like when you lift weights. No, no, this is what happens when you have an islander father and you take anabolic steroids and lift lots of weights. God, it's crazy, no? I reckon he's my free pass. The rock, I approve. My free pass. You know what? If I had a list of kind of like if I was gay, these are dudes I would do, The Rock would be on there and probably Denzel Washington. That Aquaman guy? No wonder we get along. He's my favorite actor of all time. He's the man. He's the man. I really like Mark Wahlberg movies too, but then the other day I was on his Instagram and he went hella Jesus on it and I was like, ah. Have you ever seen, okay, Mark Wahlberg, what was the movie he was in? was it fear where he was dating this chick and like he was a psychopath that they didn't know oh you got it i'll find it and i'll send it to you but it's funny because at one point like he's he's talking to the girl's father who doesn't approve and apparently he's like um he's taking the girl's virginity at this point he's also like done something else to the guy like driven this this pride car that he had that no one's ever driven and he looks at him he goes now i've pop both your cherries or something like that. And at that point I was like, Oh damn, Mark Wahlberg is fucking savage. Yeah.

CHAPTER 22

Practical Cardio Recommendations

our tagline as we told you at the beginning of this is how to be less shit so if somebody wants to like take a basic framework of how to build some aerobic fitness what does that conceptually look like if they want to be less shit from a not dying quality okay so so kind of reader's digest version is first you have to realize how much time do you have because time is time is the one thing you can't buy so how much time do you have how much can you dedicate to it the easiest lowest hanging fruit is just your standard steady state aerobics you put a heart rate strap on and you walk on an incline for 120 to 130 beats and you do it for as long as you can handle. Joel Jamison says a minimum of 30 minutes. I would tend to agree with that. I would say the more you do up front, the faster you get the adaptation, so that's the best. If you're in quarantine and you've got three or four more weeks and you can do 90 minutes of aerobics a day, fucking do it. Just put something on your TV. I know that sounds extreme to people, but the thing is we're doing such low-intensity work that you need a lot of high volume because volume and intensity have an inverse relationship, right? So the higher intense I go, the less stuff I can do. The lower intense, the more I'm going to need to listen to adaptations. So for a lot of people that are stuck at home, if you've got a treadmill, just stick the movie Fear with Mark Wahlberg in and walk and just watch the whole movie and just walk on an incline, right? And you'll usually see massive benefits within three weeks of that. So it's very high return on investment, but it does take a lot of investment capital up front. Now, if you don't have time for that, now we have to look at things. How do I increase work output but also make it aerobic in nature? So let's say 30-second sprints with four-minute rest, okay, the majority of that workout you would be recovering in an aerobic zone despite 30 seconds being glycolytic in nature. so you'd have some global and local glycolytic work for 30 seconds but then you'd have complete rest for four minutes so that the sum total would be mainly aerobic with some anaerobic benefit as well so that those would be easy ways of doing it monitoring your heart rate my my goal for most people is to get their heart rate somewhere in the 50s i think 50 resting heart rate is excellent It shows you have a pretty high VO2 max. What's it sitting at? I hit 48 the other day. Currently, today's 58, but I've also – That's it? I had half a liter of coffee this morning. So to be 58 and a half a liter deep, I'm good. That's pretty good, right? I was sitting at like 50-something yesterday after like 8 milligrams of nicotine and like six espressos. So I was doing pretty good. That's why you also like Broderick. Oh, yeah. 100%. So the thing is like the lower your heart rate is resting heart rate. So I like that kind of in the middle of the day, the lower that is and the higher your maximum heart rate is, the better your VO2 max is. It means you oxidize better. You can test this, run as hard as you can on a treadmill for 12 minutes, monitor it with a heart rate strap. How high can you get that? You want that to be as high as possible. You want your resting heart rate to be low as possible. So if you have somebody who's sitting at like, say right now, my maximum heart rate is 190. my resting heart rate's around 56 57 that gives me a vo2 max somewhere around 50 okay pretty good not that good for me so i'm now doing more cardio work because i like to be closer to 60 i just feel better that way eat a lot more food uh think better too one of the benefits of aerobic training people don't think about is the benefits on the brain so when you do aerobic work it increases blood flow to the brain and it increases uh brain derived nootrophic factor which increases synapse connections and increases brain activity, especially in areas that you don't normally use. So it actually makes you smarter, which is why when people say hashtag fuck cardio, I use that as a fucking IQ test that they're, they're fucking Neanderthal. Yep. So 30 minute sessions, 20 to 30 minutes, somewhere around 120 to 130 beats of heart rates of heart rates. That's good English. How's that for a Neanderthal comment? as many sessions as you possibly can get done. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like, it doesn't really matter. Right. So like, you know, version of exercise. So long as you are stabilizing, stabilizing, doesn't matter. I mean, you could do, like I was telling, I have a, one of my staff members is living with us right now. She she came up from New South Wales to stay with us for a bit when we got the gym open So now she actually stuck with us So now she has to live with us So we got a pretty badass home gym And I just brought a concept two rower and a spin bike. And so she's doing a lot of aerobic conditioning right now to lose weight and to improve her health markers. And she asked me the same thing, like, do you care what I do? I go, I don't give a shit what you do, as long as your heart rate stays where or want it to stay because I'm working on the heart and vascular system. I'm not working on what's going on with your legs or your arms or anything else. I'm looking at just global conditioning stuff. So if you want to do five minutes on the row or 15 minutes on the spin bike, you want to go run around the block. I don't give a shit. I just, just sustain your heart rate and the range I'm wanting for the time period I'm wanting. And I'm super happy with that. Later we'll talk about more specific localized conditioning, which is going to be, we're going from a level of general training to more specificity, which means that if she decided she wanted to say, I don't know, play AFL on the weekends, then we would start doing specific conditioning for the legs and things. Yeah. For anyone that doesn't have any equipment at all, our home gym is limited to a few resistance bands and I think like a hundred kilos of weight. So like nothing. Yeah. I the other day stood in front of the TV and ran on the spot while I watched a movie. Like that's, you don't need any equipment. You just need like a bit of, I don't know, no shame and a bit of creativity. She has no shame. The same for me, man. Like last night I ran a 25-minute session and I actually just was referencing heart rate for where I was sitting in ranges. And it was just back and forth between a push and a pull of some description, varied exercises. It really wasn't there for hypertrophy. It was just making work. Yeah. And the one thing I would say that I've found, especially in my quite unique population of primary bodybuilders, is that if you set a mode specific to them that they can't actually get their heart rate up to because they do have localized fatigue from a lactate point of view, like say sitting on a bike, then it is important that you do shift that exercise out and you don't have to do cardio. So like I'm going to actually have one of my guys soon just essentially run like a full body weight circuit with like over the shoulder med balls. Yeah. Because he cannot handle doing bike work and getting his heart rate to where it needs to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because when you're talking about like that kind of local versus global conditioning, like in a lot of cases, they haven't done enough of the conditioning work to build the enzymes locally to manage the bioenergetics. So even though their heart's handling it, not their heart is maybe like really far ahead of their musculature, where it's like now I have to go a lot harder to get my heart rate up. But I haven't built the mechanics in the musculature of the legs to facilitate that. Now my legs are on fire. I'm building up too much lactate. Okay, that's the goal was to keep that down because mitochondria don't like that very much. And when you're doing that, what you're showing is that you cannot buffer hydrogen ions anymore. You're losing that ability. So there's a lot of reasons why that could be. It could be low NAD, so it could be a low amount of B3 or activated B3. It could be the fact that you just don't have a lot of mitochondria. So acetyl-CoA will tend to build the mitochondria, which shuts down pyruvate from getting in the mitochondria. If pyruvate can't get in the mitochondria, it has to go somewhere else, so you can reduce that with hydrogen. There's a lot of things going on in all different directions. And so in a lot of cases, you might have to say, well, you know, while this exercise was great for you the first three weeks, now your heart has gotten so badass that your legs can't handle it, so we've got to find something else for you to do. right because from a bodybuilding perspective you could have him go harder on the bike but then that that may fatigue his legs for a squat session so you know you'd hit you'd hit a place where it's a law diminishing returns and actually counterproductive to what they're wanting to do with what training really matters to say a bodybuilder which is getting fucking bigger yeah yeah a quick little story and then we'll get onto the something worth sharing about if you look to explain this in actual in actual action uh at the end when i my soccer career my last season i was fortunate enough to be at uni and i did a vo2 max on the treadmill now i was a soccer player it's a running man's game yeah that vo2 max that i achieved on there with a lactate threshold my vo2 max was 67 and my lactate threshold was like what it like into the sort of low to mid range 80 percenters like super specific to my sport a week later i did the same vo2 max but on a bike and i only managed to get a vo2 max of 55 because my legs just absolutely fried from that build-up of hydrogenizing talking about and now gas my lungs are fine i'm like but i couldn't keep up the repetition necessary to complete the test so i otherwise was like what fucking 20 percent reduced capacity from a VO2 testing point of view because of the specificity of fatigue Yeah, I mean, you're looking at when you're running, you've got some deceleration happening. You've got a little bit more blood flow. The minute you get on the bike, you've got a bit of occlusion going on. It's high-intensity continuous training. So you never really get a relief from that continuous contraction. so and that that that it goes to showcase um specificity and everything that we do like because you're good at one modality you might not be good at something else so when we teach testing we teach a lot of testing in our courses you have to use the test that somebody's already pretty good at if i and you and then that has to be the test you always test against so if i do a cooper's test on someone and we're going to modify it because maybe they don't they're not a good runner maybe they're good at the rower okay i'm going to modify we're going to use the rower as the standard but then the rower always has to be what we use every time we test it because if they get up and run there's no deceleration component and it's like a centric deceleration in a rower there's no um there's no isokinetic activity to running like you have on a rower with the air display so there's a lot of different things that you have to keep like an apple to an apple and an orange to one orange. Yeah, absolutely. I did a stress test for as part of a study in when I was living in Austin at University of Texas. This is back when I was just doing strongman and power lifting. And so they same thing I didn't run at the time, they put me on a treadmill, I think I achieved somewhere around a 54 to 56 vo two max being a strength athlete. And they were surprised or like, you don't run. I'm like, I don't run, man. I do heavy weighted carries. And I do all this you know alice stones and i do all this other shit and they're like wow that's pretty amazing for vo2 max for somebody who doesn't actually run um but uh but you know what it wasn't the i wasn't gassed my legs couldn't handle it anymore like because i just didn't the incline got to a point my legs just went fuck off my heart and my lungs were still fine so you know but that's why that's why you got to be careful when you look at research because you never know how they've, you know, what they're researching may not actually be applicable to some of the stuff we're doing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

CHAPTER 23

Final Questions and Wrap-up

Now, Luke, to start off the segments, we are going to begin with asking you if you have something worth sharing. And typically it's a book or a movie or something, but it can be whatever you like, a podcast, a course, a quote. Okay. Okay, so, all right. I'll give you a quote. Can I give you a couple of things? Yeah, totally. Shoot. I'll give you a quote. This is my quote. Stephen Covey, seek first to understand, then be understood. Okay, so that's how we write our courses. If you want your client to understand how their body's working, if you want to understand how to understand your client's body, you have to seek to understand things first yourself before you can teach others, right? Especially nowadays when everybody's trying to be an educator and nobody knows shit. Like you got fucking kids who have been training people for a year and a half and now they're fucking teaching courses like what the show me your portfolio what the fuck have you done you're fucking 19 fuck off right um another thing i'm big on is you know methods are great but you need to understand the madness behind the methods so a very good thing to do is make sure you start at that foundational level learn how the body works for fuck's sake like all that stuff in the cert three, four that you just glaze through, you know, and everybody glazes through it. When you look at like, Hey, let's look at a sarcomere and let's look at the Z discs and look at where tropically where, which zone that the actin and the monosyn are cross bridging on. And everybody just goes right past that. So none of these trainers know how muscle actually contracts. They don't know anything about, so the electrochemical gradient and what happens. And they don't, to me, this stuff is inherently important to understand when you're writing a program. And if you're not, you're just shitting in your hands and throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks. So learn your biology, learn your biochemistry. You don't need to learn it. Like you're not trying to become a fucking college professor, but you need to understand it enough to know if I do this many sets, this many reps of this kind of rest in this time of retention, this is what I should predict the outcome to be. If I match that with this type of dieting, this is how I should predict the outcome to be and you should be pretty close but the only way to know that is if you actually know how the fucking cell works and how the body works at a basic you know but that very basic level i guess that would be like a car mechanic not understanding how cars work and just kind of like putting two pipes together yeah you know you gotta it like hey i know how to put gas in my car So therefore I now a mechanic No you not Yeah Fuck You know you got to know where the doohickey fits in the flange doodle. I love it. Now, is there a weird hobby or habit that you have that may surprise the listeners? Uh, it's chronic masturbating. Is that a hobby? That's not weird though. I think we're all there with you, Luke. Oh, good. I'm actually glad you're doing that. You know, I don't, man, I don't really. Let me think about that. Yeah, like, shit, man, my whole life revolves around this and Zoe and the dogs. Okay, I'll tell you something people might not know about me. I love musicals, and I love ballet, and I love going to plays. And Zoe hates all that shit. And so. Same here. Shame on you, Zoe. I hate all that shit too and Dean's always wanting to go to a musical and I'm like why? I'm an appreciator of talent you guys can go together, me and Zoe will be so fun I'm a talent appreciator especially when there's a talent that seems to be one that slumps someone given to them and then they just fucking skyrocket it especially if it's a talent that you can't do I can't sing so when I see a bunch of people on stage singing and dancing at the same time and it's beautiful I'm like, it blows my mind, right? Dude, one of the greatest things I've still ever seen is Billy Elliot live in Melbourne. Oh, really? Yeah. Probably. We just saw Elton John on his last tour. That was pretty amazing. But I'll tell you, probably the most amazing person I've ever seen sing is Michael Bublé. And I've seen him twice. And there's no pyrotechnics. There's no craziness. He just sings. and women are like and like ripping their clothes off and shit. And I'm like, and he's just, he's just like, it's the super coolest concert because that and George Strait, who you guys, do you even know who George Strait is? He is like the mat daddy of all country music, especially old country music. George, I've seen him twice and he just stands in the middle of the stage, plays his guitar and sings. And it sounds just like, it just sounds like you're listening to a CD. And it's just amazing. So that stuff blows my mind. Yeah. You and Dean should totally go on mandates to the ballet. Although really, I would link on with you. Why are we supposed to go to Book of Mormon? But I think I was out of the country. Yeah. Tickets and everything. And then you bowed. We really cut. We cried a lot all night. That would be, that would be the second time I saw it. And it's fucking amazing. Reluctantly went along. I think I went along only because I think, I think because you did it. I think, yeah, I think I took you to, I don't know. You, You and Zoe couldn't go, and then Will and Nikki also randomly – From Nexus Performance. Yeah, they booked a trip to do a seminar in New Zealand. They forgot because we booked that shit like six months in advance. Anyways, I went along, and it was actually incredible. It was because I think that knocking things that I don't support is kind of funny. So Book of Mormons was hilarious to me. Like really offensive to religious people, but like really funny for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm okay with being offensive to religious people. So I'm okay with that. No comment. No comment. All right. So I was going to say, is now the time when we sing the main line? No, we don't. No. Oh, my God. Two questions for you. The two last questions. It's your final 24 hours on earth. How do you spend it? Oh, God. Probably being as offensive and offending as many people as I can while spending as much time with Zoe and the dogs as I can. That's probably it. I don't think I'd change anything to be honest. Like, um, yeah, I think I would just do, I love my life. Like I don't feel the need to do anything else. So like, like I said, like I said, when we first started, I got everything. I got everything I've wanted out of life so far. It's been a lot of hard fucking work, but like, I've got a great life. I've got a great wife who doesn't, uh, basically lets me do whatever the fuck I want. Um, trust me. I trust her. We never fight. We think out of five years, we fought twice like fucking it's a great relationship i've got three badass dogs um a badass chihuahua that won't stop pissing and shitting in the house that's one thing but the other other than that he's the coolest dog ever and he's got this weird thing he likes shitting on like electrical things what's that that is weird so yeah so like anytime i go into my cinema room where I have all the plugs for the chairs and everything. He shits on top of that on like the little outlet extender and he poops on that. And I don't know what the fetish is with that thing, but. That's because he knows that you're risking your life to clean it with water.

yeah he likes the thrill fuck this guy he eats my chicken yeah so that was jordan shallow's answer that we recorded a podcast with recently and my answer as well i was like i'm so boring i would change nothing like mine would be a usual sunday like have coffee on the beach with dean go to a market like reply to some emails so i'm with you there luke i felt boring saying it but i agree now luke the uh the last question is from a game called shitty choices it's a would you rather game okay this is luck of the luck of the draw oh no pulling a card at random we've played some we played this with you and zoe before have we had this one before that one's boring though sorry i like the last time we played this while this is picking one that's the wrong card zoe answered one of the would you rather at speed even though it was like super a super sensitive topic about like parent sex or something and i remember we did it in uh we didn't do it in your in that lounge room, but we did give him in your lounge room. And yeah, Zoe's just like, yeah, definitely, fuck my mum, my dad or whatever it was. Oh, no, it was that one. Yeah. I've been looking forward to this with you. I know you're both just like, whatever. All right, what have we got? Do you remember that? Yes, I do. I do. Would you rather publicly announce every time you had to poop or never use your phone while pooping Oh fuck that easy I always tell people when I going to poop anyway because I poop so much That nothing What about if you were like at a wedding at a funeral, like a really formal event? Oh, I don't give a shit. Like, hey, man, sorry. Like, the dead dude's not going to give a shit. I mean, he's probably taken 40,000 shits in his lifetime, so, like, he'll understand, right? I feel, like, so offensive shitting at my wedding. And he's like, like, you haven't done this. And you can't say anything about it anyway. Fuck, man. I mean, I poop my pants at least once a month. Like, there's a weird fact you don't know about me. Here's what you'll understand. The older you get, the less you can trust a fart. And, I mean, lately I've been trusting too many of them. And so, yeah, so I've been, yeah, at least once every four weeks I accidentally poop myself. That's because of all the refried beans you eat. Fuck off. Might be the fucking MCT oil lately. Oh, yeah, that's a recipe for disaster. There's a funny one to talk about to finish this up, research application not being in real life. MCTs may delay glycogen depletion during exercise, but you need to take 40 mil of it, and you'll shit yourself the entire time you're running, so you probably won't run faster anyway. Yeah, and that's, you know, it's that, and you start thinking about baking soda this morning like people taking baking soda to basically manage hydrogen ions coming in and out of the bloodstream in the cell but the thing is you got to take like 0 milligrams per kilo so like that's like four or five teaspoons for me being 100 kilos like you're playing if you you better test this out when you're training and not do this at your fucking marathon or half marathon because if you do there's a good chance that you're gonna poop all down your leg into your shoe that's fucking disgusting yeah and on that note my friend luke if people want to find you and the muscle nerds uh how do they do that where do they go uh we've got muscle nerds was it muscle nerds underscore health on instagram we've got muscle nerds and we've got a form that we don't muscle nerds on facebook and then muscle nerds inc but we don't really do a lot of stuff except for bash chris stuffy uh for being a fucking for being isn't it no it's stuffy yeah fucking scam art uh yeah so what else what else do we have we don't have a twitter i don't and i fucking hate social media man like it's such a pain in the ass i just i wish it would just go back to where you just need to be a great fucking coach and people wanted to train you and you didn't have to like be really good at video editing and making yourself look like you know what the fuck you doing Welcome to a saturated market And then muscle nerds for our website we just new website out we good i think we on youtube yeah we on youtube muscle nerds i saw your website this morning just before we started recording this podcast i really liked it it was it's really clean and easy to navigate yeah thank you thank you yeah we got a really good good chick if anybody wants uh any help she's awesome like it's really super clean she's like a vampire she works all night so that's pretty cool so yeah maybe i was thinking about taking some inspiration from your website actually for our own um and anything to keep up to date with us i think we're all pretty good here at flex yeah well keeping up to date with flex obviously we mentioned our book um where i mean lots of gyms and pts and whatever are kind of closed for business or changing their service because of covid but as we are and always have been online we are business as usual. So if you're interested, you've got now more time to invest in your health or your goals or coaching. Now's a good time. So hit us up. Flex success.com. Did I, you flex underscore success on Instagram or 602 slash two, two, one, four gold. That's my actual address. Please don't come to my house. I'm leaving here. It's not weeks anyway. So we're leaving in four weeks. Much appreciated Luke, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Bye.

Full source transcript

Read auto-generated transcript

# #29 Luke Leaman - Cardio for meatheads

**Channel:** The Flex Success Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://app.kajabi.com/podcasts/medias/2147597588.mp3

Welcome to the Flex Success Podcast, where we teach you how to be less shit. Covering all things science, relating to nutrition, training, recovery and more. Who knows, we might even sprinkle in a dick joke or two. Welcome back. All you are joined with myself, Dean, and the queen of flex. I'm the ugly frog. Although it's a princess and a frog, isn't it? Not a queen and a frog. That's all right. I'll take the frog. And today we have the pleasure of being joined by an adopted Australian, I'm going to claim it, married to a Kiwi, but born in Texas. That's it. The muscle nerd himself, Luke Lehman. Nate, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me on, guys. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, man. I've been poking you for weeks now. Say hi. Get your face on our podcast, or more specifically, your voice. Now none of us can leave the house, so it's a good time to do it while we're all having to stay home. So perfect timing. For those of our listeners that aren't aware of Muscle Nerds or the magic that is Luke Lehman, can you tell us who you are, what you do, and why you do it? Okay. Yeah, so like you said, my name's Luke Lehman. I'm a Pisces. I like long walks on the beach and candlelight dinners and that type of shit. But yeah, look, I started in the industry, if you can say like two decades ago about. So I actually got into training when I was about eight years old. So since I come from Texas, you've got American football, gridiron football. and so we get started really early i come from a very small country town of less than 7 000 people so your options growing up was like because the only stuff we had to do in my hometown was like fuck and fight and drink and lift weights and play football that's if you've ever watched varsity blues which i was a stuntman in that is that is exactly like the town i come from where the athletes run everything and the town shuts down on friday night and all that type of stuff so I actually got into weights for that and because I was bullied a little bit when I was a kid. So like a lot of guys who go into things like bodybuilding and powerlifting and strongman, I lifted weights a lot to put on my gorilla suit because I figured the bigger and stronger I was, people would leave me alone. So that kind of got me started in the industry. And then I started, I found muscle media when I was like 12 or 13 years old, found Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, found all these guys that were saying things that made a lot of sense. And the only viewpoint I had for training was old Arnold books from the 70s that you'd find in the local library. And Frank Zane, like, were the real old shit that doesn't have a lot of science in it. So then you get these guys that are actually talking about Eastern Bloc methods and Russian methods and how the Chinese are training and how all this stuff is going on. I started getting really into that and then fast forward. And eventually I ended up working for Charles, um, as one of his proteges. And then I ended up kind of taking over his position at the company when he left. Then I left a couple of years after that, started muscle nerds. Um, and here I am somehow in Australia, married to a Kiwi. With three dog children. With what's that? With three dog children. With three dog children. You know, I've pretty much, I've pretty much got everything I was looking for out of life so far and I'm only 42 so I've got the fast car I wanted I always wanted a French bulldog and I wanted somebody I wanted to marry somebody with an accent so I pretty much got it all that's the trifecta I got it covered there's some like a good low-hanging fruit of things to get yeah that will give you then that sort of what someone with an accent in the dog lots of places well everyone has an accent when you're from Texas and living in Australia. This is true. This is true. But then he found a Kiwi. Yeah, that's so weird. You and Zoe met, I imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, at a gym or at some sort of educational course. At a course, yeah. So I was teaching for Policum Group in Sydney and she was one of the students. And I had just come off of probably one of the worst classes I'd ever taught. Not because I taught bad, because the students were terrible. like this was a PICP level one level two course where you're learning how to coach and how to train and they basically tore this guy facility to pieces like one kid got locked in the bathroom we had to kick the door in So Paul and group had to buy them a new door They started they were doing drop lunges off the guy plates and rubbed all the stickers off of his nice bumper plates One kid was doing we were doing assisted Nordic curls. And so I told the guys, I said, now the guys that are holding the ankles down, make sure you keep your head down in case something weird happens. kid had his head up uh the guy had 80 pounds on the bar he let go of the triceps rope and the uh triceps ball thing hit him right in the eye and he had to get like four stitches blood everywhere so i came off of that course going oh my god australians are the dumbest motherfuckers i've ever met in my life what in the fuck is wrong with these people so i walked into the next class which was teaching biosig and i said i hope you guys are smarter than those dumb motherfuckers from last weekend. And so that's kind of how I set the tone of the weekend. And so Zoe instantly did not like me. And, and, you know, I didn't, I didn't really notice her in class, she was there to learn. And when you go to some of these courses, you can tell like some of the girls, especially biosig, where people are getting half naked and pinching each other. There's people coming in and looking to hook up like people will actually do. Hey, Daisy, people will actually do contest prep for Biosig to look good, right? It's a weird culture, but Zoe comes in in like trackies and kind of like a... I'm convinced it was a side ponytail. She says she's never had one, but I'm convinced it was... She was... It was a real loose kind of three-quarter ponytail, like didn't wear any makeup. She wasn't there. She was there to learn, not for anything else. So I just kind of like glazed over her for whatever reason. And plus, I was still mad from the weekend before and those students. And then then I ended up coming up to Gold Coast and to stay with a friend of mine who is actually the guy who told her to do the course. I saw her post on someone's post. I thought she was funny. So as you do, I cyber stalker all of her social media. And I said, oh, man, I really want to meet this chick. So I texted her and I said, hey, you know, kind of slid into those DMs. And I said, hey, I'm here for three weeks. Will you go out with me? And she says, no, absolutely not. Just shut me down immediately. So I'm like, I'm going, are you kidding? Like, what's the deal? Let's talk this out. She's like, no, no, you don't remember me. You were my instructor last weekend for biosec. You're an arrogant prick and blah, blah, blah, blah. She actually sent, Polycom Group sent anonymous surveys, and she actually gave me a bad review. So, yeah, so, but I didn't let that stop me. I like a good challenge. So every day I dropped in her DMs and asked her out over and over and over and over, and I finally wore her down. Is that harassment? If anything, this is a testament to Luke's game and charisma. Oh, all right. I've got a tattoo here that says relentless. So it took me two weeks, convinced her to go out, and it was supposed to be just one, like just a date, kind of a, you know, we both knew what it was supposed to be. It was just going to be kind of like a hookup one-night stand type thing, and it ended up being a four-day date. And then two and a half months later, she sold her car, quit her two jobs, and flew to America and met me in Boston. And we've been together ever since. It's been five years now. I reckon the only kind of person that would have that sort of behavior would be a side ponytail wearing chick. There's no way she was a straight 180 with a normal ponytail. No one does that with a normal ponytail. Respect to Zoe for shutting you down and telling you you're a piece of shit when she thought it. I love that honesty. That is so good. I've also been houndering Zoe to come on the podcast too because Zoe's got a big brain and people need to know about Zoe. And now she's already featured. She doesn't even know it, but she's got a background feature. So she's on here now. she may as well come on and talk more shit later. I told her this morning, I said, I'm going to go ahead and tell them, I'm going to go ahead and commit you for next week. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'll, I'll, I'll do it myself. I'm like, all right, well let's, let's come on, let's get it going. Like she needs to get out there. People need to hear from her, man. She's got, she's got such a different perspective than a lot of the rest of us because she, she can't, she wasn't really a trainer. Like when I met her, she had been doing bootcamp stuff for a year and a half, two years. and she was done a couple of personal training sessions. So she's been able to see kind of both sides of being just a regular civilian versus actually being in the industry and then skyrocketing up in the industry to kind of that weird niches and seeing a weird pocket of the strength and conditioning industry Speaking of which just going from being a regular civilian to skyrocketing I understand that your main audience at Muscle Nerds is other coaches because you see how many bad coaches there are out there and how that has detrimental effects for the clients that put their trust in them. So you run some courses. I think you've got multiple going on right now. You've got a 10-week program design course, nutritional fundamentals course, and then you've got another one aimed at helping coaches understand how to coach online versus how to coach face-to-face. Did I get that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you did. It's basically some of the stuff you wouldn't learn at a traditional course. and because I've taken over the last 20 years so many courses and I've delivered so many courses and I've seen so much content. So I'm always looking for putting something out that no one's put out before and where can we fill these holes where people aren't understanding this stuff. And one of the things, especially with client communication, like if I'm going to – people think, and you guys know because you're primarily online, people think that online training is easy. well if you're doing it right it's hard and it is very very time consuming it is much more time consuming than being in the gym um if you like being if you like a lot of admin work and you're great at communication and you want to be on sitting at your desk 12 hours 16 hours a day then online training is perfect for you if you're more of a people person and you need that personal like connection with people then you need to stay in the gym and stay offline because the online of markets getting super saturated. And so, and then people are devaluing the market by just selling stock standard crap programs and not actually giving the service. So we put out, we pulled a piece of our program design, the big course, we pulled it out and kind of revamped it a little bit and set it out of, this is how you need to communicate with your client. This is how like, this is like red flags you need to look for when you didn't know when something's out of your scope of practice when you need to what you can and can't do how to deliver the product different apps and things you can use staying in scope um and then things like check-ins how do you do your check-ins how do you structure your week right and so it's a part of the course that uh i had shane o'leary one of our coaches do because he's very very pedantic and he's very kind of operational i'm the worst one to do it like if you if you're a robot and you can i can hand you program and I don't have to see you for four weeks. I'm your coach because I can write you, I can write you a fucking bad-ass program to get results, but you got to be able to go execute it without a lot of input for me. I'm not a good communicator or, and I'm not a good hand holder. Right. So Shane's very good at that. So he wrote all that. So it's very good about opening communication and kind of the back and forth and what you should expect from your client, what they should expect from you and that, that type of thing. Right. Yeah. I love that. I I've done both i've been um a face-to-face trainer and then eventually moving online and i totally agree that it is harder online um because of the things that you mentioned like people can't just execute it without a lot of hand-holding or without a lot of queuing or picking up issues and whatever and it's more time consuming doing it online if you do it right because you need videos and then you need to type out a response or record a video and like there's all this back and forth and it's harder to communicate clearly when you're not with the person and i also found visual cues really helpful like you could say to someone anterior pelvic tilt and they're like hey but if you're there in person and you're just like sticking your ass out you're like anterior and then they get it from that visual you don't have that online so i love that you're filling that gap and i think you're doing the industry a great service uh by helping trainers improve their standard because the standard is pretty fucking low in the industry generally i would say real fucking low i mean it's a very low barrier to entry thing like anyone can go get their training certification it's the cert three four so basic your grave your grandmother decided tomorrow that she wanted to train she could be a trainer within six weeks and she's never fucking lifted a weight in her life it's even worse in america where you can do a two-day course you can do a weekend course and be a trainer oh my god oh my god worse than that some people don't even need to do the little shitty course to call themselves a trainer because like there's not a lot of uh what's the word i'm looking for there's not a lot of um the barrier for entry is really low but you can just call yourself a trainer and someone's going to be like i'll hire you they're not going to ask you they're going to assume that you're qualified and you know what you're talking about I mean you see it in every segment of our industry too I remember you you you I like I started powerlifting when I was like 14 And I powerlifted for a long time And I got to what would be considered a pretty pretty probably the nowadays the lower end of what would be considered elite level powerlifting And it took me, you know, 13, 14, 15 years to get there. And so for me, everybody, I became a personal trainer when it wasn't cool to be a personal trainer. Like nobody was a personal trainer. That was my mom even said to me when I decided to become one, she goes, this is just going to be a hobby. You'll never make a career out of this. Right. And so like, that's how kind of taboo it was to teach people how to exercise. And there wasn't a big market for it. So then when everybody started doing it, I decided, you know what, well, I do strongman and I do powerlifting. And I've done that since I was 14. I'm going to call myself an S&C coach, because that's kind of what I do really. And I don't want to be a personal trainer. So then everybody started calling themselves an S&C coach. So you would get guys that were 65 a kilo soaking wet who couldn't fucking bench press the body weight they couldn't even squat their body weight and they would call themselves a strength and conditioning coach i'm like what kind of fuck it are you a strength and conditioning coach for toddlers because i don't understand like you're not fucking strong and you've never been strong like if you've never had if you've never had say 310 on your back trying to do a deep squat you can't possibly understand the difference between that and 150 like there's a massive difference between that being able to breathe being able to move like the mechanics completely changed so you know where you would like you and i all do now with the with like bodybuilding and stuff which i'm trying i'm like kind of getting away from that i can't i just can't do it anymore man i can't deal with all the mommy daddy issues and all that other shit um but like you'll get somebody who decided to do a show and they'll do a show in like fucking miles where there's like three contestants and they'll place because there were only three contestants so they'll be like oh i placed i placed third in my first show now i'm a competition coach and you're like you were the least shitty looking person on stage there was only three people there like you'll see people get there that you'll get your pro card by default because you were the best out of two like just it's just us our industry so it's so wacky man because you can basically do whatever the fuck you want to do. And unless you hurt someone, no one's ever going to do anything about it. Even if you do, we know plenty of people that have injured and harmed their clients in many ways. And what are the repercussions? Like most of the time there's not. There was a Sydney trainer that had a squat problem go viral. I can't remember who it is. But they basically had a dude back squatting outside of a safety cage in the middle of a fucking fitness first floor. He could barely stand with the weight on his back. And he's like, go on then. you can do this and he's he's personal trainers like spotting him and he crumbles forward drops the bar and then the personal trainer goes over his back like a jockey because he's getting pulled by the bar it went that motherfucker is still training people because i didn't realize who it was until like maybe like a year ago i saw him pop back up i was like oh he's still in the industry that's interesting like there's plenty of trainers trainers we shouldn't give them that title plenty of people that uh try and coach people um in federations that are untested and gear them to the fucking gills and their health and they do it with nutrition as well and girls just don't have their period for years on end or there's all these negative consequences that they didn't foresee happening and wouldn't have agreed to if they knew um and these these people just continue on like you wanted to do a competition you know yeah man the stories i could tell i remember being when I first kind of started training competitors, I remember being in San Antonio, Texas, and it was at a natural competition. The girl I was dating at the time, I was coaching her for it. And we're kind of like hanging around. And one of the competitors was on the phone and you could hear him talking to his coach like, oh my God, I got randomly drawn for drug testing. What do I do? And you can hear the coach basically going, abort, abort, abort. I can't, I can't let it, I can't have anybody know that I have you on gear while you're at a natural competition. It's like, bro, if you want to do drugs, there's plenty of competition for you. Like it's crazy to me. Yeah. Like I personally think that if you've ever done steroids, you shouldn't be able to do natural. Even if you haven't done gear for say seven years, it's still unfair because when you're on steroids, you build more mononuclei out there. There's things that you build that are long lasting that never go away. and so it's still an unfair advantage even if you take seven years off and you haven't taken gear in seven years you still should not be able to go on a natural competition. The official rules with bodybuilding at least in Natty comps is five years and we think that legally sure you're abiding by the rules but it's not really abiding by the spirit of the rules. We had

This conversation with genius project is quite a few episodes ago and we disagree on this topic. We agree with you in that we refuse people that are on gear and say, Hey, we want, I want you to coach me for this competition. We'll just say like, that's cheating. We can coach you, but not in that federation in this federation, or you can find another coach. Whereas a project doesn't really care so much, but we're totally in line with you. If anything, I think Broderick finds it exciting because it's kind of like a game. Yeah. you know um but yeah it's a bad one that i some federations are slightly different some of them now have a blanket rule it kind of says if you use any substance that could enhance the performance it is otherwise not conceptual yeah and they blanket term it so like you could even say that like the reason why stimulant is banned because it gives you some advantage and they talk about an athletic advantage but you're still relying on uh the moral integrity of the individual to say yeah no i haven't done any of that because yeah but so does sleeping in a bed instead of a cave like yeah you're an advantage and then where do you draw the line like what about creatine that gives you an obvious ergogenic advantage um what about electrolytes what about whey protein like where do you draw the line uh what is natural yeah yeah and here's the thing too here's the kicker weight lifting isn't natural like there's nothing natural about it like we're primates we're built to climb and like run and jump and shit like that. Like everything that we all do every day, when we go in and we squat and we bench press, there is absolutely nothing inherently natural about that. That is completely artificial. Getting hypertrophy to a human body, evolutionary speaking, is not natural. Your body doesn't want to get gigantic. That's why I've had this argument with people for years that BMI still matters, even if you're big and ripped and you think you're in shape. All right. And I've had this argument and last year, I think Luke Tolick sent me a, sent me a paper on it showing that people that are bigger, even if they're leaner, are still at a higher risk for mortality than people with a lower BMI. And part of it was, we can probably make a percentage where the BMI is probably a little bit too narrow. If you're lifting weights, maybe we, and it's not in your natural, we open that up a little bit. So for me, if you're in the overweight category and you're lifting weights, that's probably pretty good. But if you're in the obese category, because you're massive, because you're on a bunch of gear, you need to really have a coming to Jesus talk with yourself because I don't give a shit that you're fricking 6% body fat. If you're, if you're my height, if you're six foot tall and you're 124 kilos and you're 5% body fat and you're like, what's that, like 35, 36 BMI, you are increasing your risk for all cause mortality. I don't care that you think you're healthy and in shape because you're fucking oats and oatmeal every day. Let's break that down a little bit more because I think it is important. I've had the same argument, share the same opinion as you is that obviously the further you shift away from that sort of bell curve, central point of the bell curve for body weight that you are increasing the stresses of all cause mortality what are some of the things despite the fact that you may otherwise appear to look healthy or look lean and fit what are some of the problems that people need to be aware of with escalation of body weight irrespective of what that is first thing is i mean number one is the blood pressure all right you got to keep that blood pressure in check and um you know how it is here in australia where it's hashtag fuck cardio The one tool that makes it the easiest, probably the most effective tool to drop your blood pressure other than assessing sodium-potassium balance, the best tool is stress management and cardiovascular conditioning. There's a lot of guys, especially the bigger guys, who would probably do really well if they would just do a couple of big blocks of conditioning before they begin prep. and don't use you instead of using cardio to chase calories initially do it for the adaptations on oxidation so that you you can eat more food during prep and you can oxidize more food faster you have more energy you can train you have better performance while you're in the middle of your prep so um you know people need to start thinking about what are the adaptations and what they're trying to do and most people use will use cardio for chasing calories when what we need to think about it is what adaptation am I looking to do, right? And that can have long-term effect. If I want to lower my blood pressure, the easiest way to do it is through aerobics. I mean, that's what we've found in changing the pliability and the elasticity of your vascular system and then changing the cardiac morphology so that you can perfuse more blood per pump instead of really thickening up that left ventricular wall and making it very inefficient for your heart to beat properly That one of the main ones Another one is looking at things like creatinine clearance So people with a lot more muscle tissues they going to create a lot more creatinine which means their their bone levels are going to be off So every time they go in, they're going to expect to show that they have, like their EGFR will typically be a little bit low. The bigger you are, that's pretty, pretty normal. So you want to, but you still need to keep that in check too, because there could be some type of, you know, kidney, chronic kidney disease type thing going on with people that they might not catch if they just assume that they have, you know, the 50 on their EGFR is okay. They really want to make sure that they're getting the rest of that stuff checked and look at their creatinine clearance, looking at their urea clearance and things like that to make sure that they don't have some hidden kidney issue that's being masked by total body mass or by total lean body mass i should say so essentially what he's saying is as lean body mass goes up some of those byproducts of that are going to show up in these blood panels as a potential negative absolutely they will use that then as an excuse to say my levels are fine it's because i'm massive yeah in actual fact we could have some underlying uh impacts or underlying effects going on at those those organs the filtration rate of the kidneys that they need to and you see it you see it the other way as well too like if you see people who have no like they're very skinny they may have really high egfr or filtration for their kidneys but they actually have chronic kidney disease and the only thing that's the reason they look so good on their labs is because they have no muscle and they don't eat a lot of protein so the more protein you eat and the more muscle you have and the more you train the more that's going to lower that value so that it's going to skew different values and you want to make sure that you're looking at trends across a long period of time to see to make sure that there's not some ticking time bomb and god forbid you end up having a stroke or a heart attack and and it just came out of nowhere you know and i'll say that like came out of nowhere well if fuck man if you're using three grams of gear a week and you've been doing that for five years and your blood pressure is 168 over 102 it didn't just come out of nowhere like it just it your body just finally got to a point where it couldn't compensate anymore and the compensation was I'll just shut down. Ironically, people look at really big dudes that are really lean. And when they have no idea what they're talking about, they go, well, they're so fit. They're so healthy. Oh my God. That heart attack came out of nowhere. How most the healthiest person that I know suffer from this, but like really there's just a misunderstanding going on. There's a misunderstanding of what, like you've got, you've got healthy and you've got fit. then you've also got obviously unhealthy and unfit and then you've got the way someone looks and the way someone looks is not truly indicative of how fit they are right when i first when i first started teaching bioseg like full-time and i moved to rhode island um i wasn't feeling right i looked fine i had abs i had you know cephalic vein abs everything i fucking i was still swatting like 600 pounds and i was still you know i was still a unit and i i but i didn't feel right like I wanted to cry after sex and I actually would cry after I masturbated. That was really weird. That's because you're not good at it. And then I'd do it and I'd cuddle myself, you know, and, you know, just there was something I was sad and depressed and there was something not right. So I had, I was like, man, there's got to be something wrong with my testosterone. So sure as shit, I go to the doctor and low testosterone, high estradiol. But, you know, that was all an effect of a higher order thing. So I had all these issues with metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, my fucking triglycerides were like 399. They should be well under 99. My LDL was high. My bloods looked like somebody who was getting ready for a contest prep, and I was not taking anything at all. It was just basically stress and overdoing things. And I had to finally say, shit, man, I got to get my shit together. Like you can't see health. You can only measure health and make assumptions if you're getting the right types of labs and metrics like taking heart rate and measuring heart rate variability and heart rate and measuring things like blood pressure and keeping tabs on all that stuff. Yeah, I think you definitely can't see it, but you absolutely can feel it. and the issue with uh the group of individuals we've been referencing here high bmi as a result of lean body mass is that there's cognitive dissonance associated with they want to look a particular way so they take particular things to achieve that it's it's above what they're naturally capable of and they do not want to recognize the way they truly feel yeah rather they just want to express how they think people think they feel by how they look yeah this isn't limited to just people who take steroids though I know plenty of boys and girls who are natural but they have a huge exercise dependence They you know they have orthorexia They think they eating right because they only eating clean foods or whatever, but the relationship with food is so poor. Their social life is suffering because they're so obsessed with exercise and eating well, and their health just isn't what it should be. But because they are putting so much energy into it, they think it must be good. But really they could be doing themselves a disservice because like where's room for balance then yeah there's room for de-stressing or least mode yeah yeah you know you see those those girls and they'll go i don't they'll look at you and they'll tell you straight up i don't know how girls don't eat i don't know how girls can be anorexic and you're like but you're training like 30 hours a week do you not understand like that's the same thing and you're you're only eating like 1200 calories a day and you're training like 21 to 24 hours a week like do you not understand like you are anorexic you're just using exercise to as the you know not eating anything thing and they're like what i'm like yeah you're fucked up like then you got you got shit and we all do and especially in our industry we're all fucked up like that's why the majority of us got into the industry it's always at least us us guys that have been in it for a while we got into the industry to help people and we love what we do nowadays people get in the industry because i think they're going to make you know seven figures naked because i've been sold a bunch of bullshit but a lot of us got in the industry to help other people because we didn't know how to help ourselves so that became our addiction is transforming people's bodies and their lives and getting them stronger winning contests and that's the way we kind of patted ourselves on the back and kind of had pain avoidance from maybe early childhood issues or even adult trauma and things like that. Mine was something my mother said to me, which a long time, that same thing where she said, well, this will be a hobby that you'll never make a career out of this. That's my mommy issue thing. And it seems like such a stupid thing to hold on to. But when you're really passionate about something and you're like 19 or 20 years old and for somebody to, you've got a long, I mean, you're looking at like 60 to 70 more years of life. And when you're like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And then your parents, someone in authority that's always been there for you, shoot you down, man, I don't really fuck you up. Right. And, uh, when I was a little kid, I was, I was an eighties kid. So I was into Kung Fu and ninjutsu and all this stuff because of Bruce Lee and all that stuff. So I did a lot of martial arts and I was told at home that if you use this on anyone defending yourselves, you're going to get it worse when you get home. So I know how to kick people's asses, but I had to let myself get my ass kicked all the time because I knew if I got in trouble at school for knocking somebody out, I'd get in trouble at home even worse. So I ended up, you know, starting to bash the weights because I thought, man, if I get real fucking big, nobody's going to mess with me. And then when I got to college, I realized that drunk dudes love to mess with big guys. Yeah, that's the truth. And then he gets you in a lot of fucking trouble when you're 124 kilos and some tiny little guy's fucking with you because he's got a little bit too much liquid confidence in him. Yeah, it's a weird thing. There's almost like there's a bro code and then there's an anti-bro code. The bro code is like you walk past a big guy and they look at you and they're like, they give you a nod like, you and me, bro. And I'm like, no, not really. But sure. And then the opposite of that is like I say this to Liz, like I just want to walk the beach with my shirt off because I wouldn't mind getting some sun. Yeah. but I know for certain people are like, look at that fuckwit, you know, whereas some fat dude or some super skinny dude can walk the beach freely and everyone's just like, good on them, man. They don't even become noticeable. It's super weird. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like, um, I mean, I won't even, if, if I'm not in, if I can't see like at least, at least four abs, if I'm not at least 15% body fat, I won't take my shirt off at the beach. I'm like, I'm good. I'm good. I don't want to get chafed, man. And I don't want to get fined, you know? I'm so safe. You know, there has been a couple of times that the bro code has really saved me, especially in Texas. And I'll tell you two. One, I probably shouldn't because, well, I was doing illegal things both times. So one day I was driving. I had a sports car at the time, and I was in Dallas, Texas on Interstate 35. And I was going, I think the speed limit was something like 65 miles an hour. And I think I was going about 120. And so I got pulled over. I was trying to get to the bar to get one last drink with my buddies before last call. It's a very, very smart way of doing it. But I was like fucking 22. And I got pulled over. And I got pulled over by a Texas Highway Patrol guy. So the Highway Patrol in Texas those guys don fuck around Like you don get warnings with them You get tickets or you go to jail or whatever So I remember the guy steps out of his car and it this big black cowboy And he's got his Stetson on and his boots, and he walks over. And the guy's massive. He's probably got like 20-inch arms. And he looks at me, and he goes, why are you speeding? I go, man, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm just trying to get to the bar to have one last drink. and I was pretty decently big. So he kind of looks at me. I kind of look at him and he nods. He goes, all right, slow it down. I'll see you later. That was it. That was it. But it was a bro code moment, right? Because, you know, you're a lifter. I'm a lifter. Okay, we're in this together. Because they would never, never let you off. The second time is I was passing over the Mexican border with a bunch of drugs on me. So I had gone to Mexico and I packed my crotch with Sustanon and veterinary D-ball and Clomid and all this shit. And I'm standing there and I'm shitting my pants because I've got like $2,000 worth of steroids strapped to the inside of my legs. And this was all for me, right? This was going to carry me through the next year. So I wasn't like drug trafficking. to sell to people. This was for my own personal shit. I'm standing there and I'm in line to walk back across and I'm shitting bricks. I'm like, if I get caught with this, I'm fucked. I'm fucked. But again, early 20s, you don't understand consequences in your early 20s. I look up and the guy, the Border Patrol guy looks at me. We lock eyes. Big, massive dude all roided up. I'm looking to him big massive dude all roided up with two thousand dollars with the roids in my crotch he kind of gives me a wink and a nod grabs the two little frat boys in front of me says get on the line come over here we got to check you and sir you come on through and i was like yeah so there are times when the bro code is we're good we're glad to have the bro code right he's like i know why you're crossing this border i cross it also 100 percent I think the biggest thing that I've noticed with individuals that go to your courses and all the rest of it is that it's a twofold thing. One, they enjoy the stories. You're a charismatic dude. You have great delivery. But secondly, it's because we've talked about trainers in the start of this podcast and how people fuck it up all the time. And I think they fuck it up because they work at a surface level understanding of what they're doing. And they're essentially just regurgitating shit they've seen. Yeah. They take the protocol. They don't reinvent it. They don't understand it. They just give it to the person to follow up. You're more of a ground up kind of guy. And you teach from the bottom up, which I think is really cool. So I think in light of us talking about the BMI and now the cardio, this has been a really interesting time with this COVID-19. We'll release this during this time of people still being away, where I've said to a lot of my clients, this is probably a blessing in disguise because it forces you out of your current behaviors of only weight training and it forces you into potential fear points like doing some cardio respiratory or cardiovascular dominant training so for those that need to understand what this is all about the benefits of cardio respiratory training and then how that transfers potentially even into muscle growth and how it supports it and it's not perhaps anti it could you break down like what cardio respiratory training actually is and how we can go about it and why people might one to actually consider. Yeah. So, and that's the thing, it's such a broad topic. Like if you go into a room of a hundred coaches and you say, all right, we're going to talk about cardio. They immediately think about, oh, I'm going to burn calories. And I, I still use, I still use, uh, Broderick's that little rant he did that last time he was in Brisbane. I remember sitting in the back of the room and, uh, he was asked about do your cardio rant. And now I'm now keep in mind, I'm looking at this guy and I'm looking at him hobbling around on stage, power lifter, half crippled. I'm convinced. And I'm the dude in the room that's known as like, kind of like the Brisbane cardio guy, even though I'm not, you know, but we've been told, we've talked about it so much over the last five years because no one's doing it. They just, they're like, just do your weightlifting. Great. That's cool. But if you want to be healthy, why don't we need a little bit of this as well? Right? So I'm sitting there and I'm shitting, bricks because I don't know what he's going to say and I'm thinking he's going to say something that we're going to end up getting into some type of battle. Then he actually just surprised the shit out of me by going on a rant about, stop calling it cardio because semantics matter. Call it cardiovascular respiratory training and that's what keeps your body alive. You know what's bad for performance? Dying. I just lost it and I went, that's when I became a Broderick fan. When he did that, we

because it's so true. Now, when you look at cardiovascular conditioning, most people look at, they look at marathon runners, right? Or they look at, they look at like Karen from next door, who's been trying to lose weight. So she's been getting on a step mill, you know, and she just, she never goes any faster. She just kind of talks to her buddy and watches Oprah while she's on the treadmill or whatever. Cardiovascular training is just like strength training. Okay. You've got a continuum. So if I look at strength training, I've got a continuum from strength and muscular endurance all the way down to even super maximal lifts, maximal strength to super maximal strength. Conditioning, the same thing. I've got walking, which is aerobic in nature, but doesn't really burn a lot of calories. Then I can go a little harder on that and I can work my way up to like somewhere around, you know, 60 to 65% of my VO2 max. That's where fat metabolism starts to kind of peak out and the adaptations. Once you exceed that, they'll start to drop and then carbohydrate oxidation comes on too. Both two very important things. So if someone is wanting to build more mitochondria and they want to make more energy and they want to be able to add a few more reps to every 12 rep max, it's probably going to be beneficial to build up your mitochondria as much as you can because it allows you to recycle energy between sets faster and it allows you to recovery between workouts a lot faster. It also allows you to eat more food because you oxidize more food. You have more power output over time. So there's a host of benefits that actually will relate to your lifting, especially if it's bodybuilding. If you think about the name of the game for weight loss or for fat loss specifically for bodybuilding, a lot of the times when you look at, we obviously understand nutrition is the majority of, if you want to lose weight, nutrition is, as they say, 80% of it. Or you might even say it's fucking 100% of it, right, as far as weight loss. The training dictates what weight you lose and how your mitochondria process nutrients. If I have more mitochondria, I can oxidize carbs and fats at a lot higher rate, which means I actually burn more when I'm sitting around doing nothing. I burn more when I'm sleeping. I burn more when I'm training. If I burn more when I'm training, guess what? That means I get stronger faster. That means my muscles grow a lot faster, right? And then what people need to understand, too, is depending on your rep range, your lifting may already be aerobic in nature anyways. If you're doing, like, there are people that are doing 25, 30 reps on a leg extension. I hate to tell you this, but that's realistically about 75% aerobic and only about 25% anaerobic. And you're working a lot of those type 1 fibers that everybody's told don't work, to type one fibers because they make you weaker and slow and all this other ridiculous shit you know what they also do is they also stabilize joints which is pretty important for lifting as well sorry i just said ridiculous shit i um because gyms are closed right now i'm changing the way that i'm training and anyways last night i just did a yoga class on youtube and the chick is like and now we're gonna go into some power yoga and we're gonna shock the body into being fitter and I was like oh are we we're going to shock the body are we and then from there I went to 1.5 speed to get the class over and done with because I thought she was so my time so and but 1.5 speed on yoga wouldn't recommend it because she's like breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out just turns into otherwise parasympathetic fully sympathetic I was really stressed out by the end of the class because yeah not the goal um but anyways yeah don't say dumb shit people yeah but yeah i mean look we've all done it though we've all said dumb shit and the thing is like i don't want to sit here at 42 years of age for the 20 20 plus year career and tell people act like i've never done dumb shit i did a lot of dumb shit when i worked at pollock and group i said a lot of stupid shit that i regret now which is part of why i left and yes i was let go and the majority of probably why i was let go is because i was always arguing with them about how unscientific parts of that, what I was teaching was, I didn't feel comfortable with it. And I said, we need to stop teaching that says, no, this is trademarked and this is what it is. And you have to teach what it is. So, um, you know, I was constantly in trouble for saying things and going, saying things that weren't in the material. I actually got a text from a guy that was in one of my classes back in like 2013, 2014. And he was laughing about how I stood up there and said, yeah, I work for Pollock and Groot, but nobody really likes me because I teach shit that's not in the book. So, you know, we've all done and said dumb shit. And even right now, as experienced as the three of us are, in five years from now, we'll have the same conversation. Go, hey, remember back in 2020 when we thought this? Man, we were stupid. Fuck. I hope so because that's a sign of progress, isn't it? Yeah. But also the cool thing about I think individuals that take the time to become more educated in the baseline stuff and build from the ground up like we were talking about before is you never really ever talk in absolutes. No. This is indicating. This suggests. This suggests. This may be the case. I think this is the best based on the current. It's likely to be. So you never actually feel like you can't go back on what you said because you're like, guess what? I learnt some more shit, you know? And back then I said it was probably the best. Now I'm saying this might be the best. whereas people that are just like no no you you only do this very dogmatic yeah that means they have to go back on their own like their own concepts i think too i think that like um something that jackson poe said to me because i do occasionally i do like consults with him on how to research right i mean who who better to do it than a meathead that uh is into the same type of shit that i'm into who also is a phd candidate so you know it's probably the best person look at or PhD. So something that he told me, he said, Luke, he goes, I want you to understand what research is. He goes, research is not there to prove anything. It's only there to falsify things. And I went, huh? He goes, yeah. He goes, we can't prove shit. He goes, if somebody says we've proven this, we've proven that he goes, they're full of shit. All we use that to is to test against stuff that we see empirically. And to say, whether if what we, if our understanding of this is close or not. And I went, man, that's a really good way of thinking about it. So then ever since then, I've always said, like, this is what the, like you said, this is what the research indicates, you know, this is inconclusive, but it looks like it's probably going to be like this. But we can't prove anything. Or if I have a theory or a hypothesis of something, and I'll tell people, like, I can't, I'm gonna, I'm pulling this out of my ass, I'm going to be straightforward with you. I cannot find this in the literature, but looking at the biochemistry and looking at the physiology of it, this looks like it makes sense. So I'm just going to tell you to just keep that in mind that this might be the way this works, but I can't prove it yet. I can't find anything that anybody agrees with me on what's going on here, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's certainly validity and value and weight in empirical evidence. yeah uh what there isn't waiting is is suggesting that you know why like you've just said you know that's the problem because that's when we start to get that typical dogma so we start to get people saying oh this is the only way you know and preaching shit as opposed to just saying that's what i'm what i'm seeing yeah i think what people need to is they need to have um they need to have a peanut gallery of colleagues that can tell them when they're full of shit or to go against like for me, one of my guys is Dr. Mike T. Nelson. Like he's a very good personal friend of mine. And I was actually listening to a couple of his podcasts this morning where he mentioned some talks that he and I had where we were talking about things like hydrogen ions and lactate and why someone would have high serum lactate, how that refers back to metabolic inflexibility. And we kind of both came to the same conclusion. We were talking it out. And there's a lot of times where I'll tell him like, Hey, I've got this idea, blah, blah. And you know, he'll look at me and goes, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. However, and then he'll throw like 10 papers at me. And then I look at it and I'm like, fuck, now I'm back at square one. All right. So, you know, if you have to be willing to eat a piece of humble pie and just say, okay, what I thought I knew or what I thought I figured out, um, isn't exactly how that works. And I have to be able to go back and tell people, especially if I teach it in one of my classes, I have to be able to go back and say, Hey, remember this, what I taught you? That's not actually how it works. I'm really sorry for teaching it to you that way that's how i thought it worked at the time but i've actually found something that works better or found it worked differently yeah i think that attitude is so supportive of the scientific method um because when people have dogmatic views they kind of put themselves on a team right and so even if like your football team is losing you're still going to bat for that team you're still going to support them you're not going to halfway through the game switch your hat from blue to red whatever yeah um but but when we have that attitude of this seems to be the case and then evidence comes out to kind of contradict that you're like oh well maybe this is more likely and then that's how science pushes forward and that's how we progress so i think that's that's really important for the health of progress generally yeah in science yeah appreciate i think that the result exists but we perhaps don't know the method as to why it does occur uh funnily enough you mentioning jackson it's the perfect example of that is that that we have been implementing these refeeds and intermittent dieting strategies and potential diet breaks. Which he's researching for those of you that don't know. Yeah, these high calorie days within a fat loss target for the long term. And there's always been ideas around why it works or why the result perhaps is better, but there is a fucking mess of data in regards to what the actual truth is Yeah Even he alluding to any he annoyed us with illusion alluding to like well my data doesn really go alongside what I thought was I thought was going to be the reason or like what was actually improving these strategies. So, well, when we spoke to Jackson, his paper was not yet finalized or conclusive or whatever. We were sort of talking to him just after he finished collecting the data and he was just going through the process of analyzing it. um and trying to piece it together so maybe he's made more progress since then i'm not sure yeah it's due for july but i think it was the same thing can't wait yeah he was alluding to like the result is probably in line with what we would expect but the reasons and some of the the stuff within that he expected to see with performance and high carbohydrate dieting uh intermittently didn't align and it surprised him and i was like fuck man like this is just going to make it more confusing again yeah i mean i've got my ideas around some of this stuff with continuous versus intermittent dieting and things like that. And like, I know his mentor did the Matador's diet and a lot of coaches will fill the matter or diet out. I think it was a stupid fucking study. I'm just going to say that. And I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with what we do. It was obese people that weren't training has nothing to do with anybody. If I have, if I have somebody who's morbidly obese and they come to me and they're like, I'm, I can walk and that's all I'm going to do. Great. That works well. But my clients all train four or five days a week with weights and they do like three or four conditioning sessions a week. To me, it's not a good example to throw out for your argument around intermittent dieting. I honestly don't think that continuous dieting, if you match the calories over the, say, six months, I don't think it really matters if you do continuous or in a minute, as long as the continuous diet isn't a massive calorie deficit. Stop dieting people on 40% deficit and thinking you're going to be able to sustain that for six months. It's fucking retarded. If you want to do that, give them diet breaks. But to me, I have to talk to my clients and say, okay, you guys have had your eyes checked before, right? And they go, which is more clear, lens A or lens B? Okay, then what about this one, lens A or lens B? Lens A or lens B? And you go through all these different lenses till you find the one that makes you see the most clearly. And that's how I look at like diet and training. I'm like, okay, what makes, what sounds better to you that you just under eat a little bit and you're never really that hungry, but you're a tiny bit hungry or you're real fucking hungry for two weeks, but you know, you get to eat a lot for two days, you know, depending on what they want. That's what I'm going to put them on and depending on what they can be complying on. but I don't, as long as the, as long as the calories are matched, I don't think it's that going to be that big of a deal, but who fucking knows I'm also a fucking college dropout. So who gives a shit? Well, we have a really thorough questionnaire and consultation process with our clients to figure out what does fit you best. Cause we don't have one way that's best. What's best is what works for the client. So that's why we ask a lot of annoying questions, which takes a little bit more time than just like, here's this program for $49.95, off you go. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty similar to you, Luke, in that I don't really think there's a hell of a lot going on, like positively from a physiological point of view from intermittent versus continuous. I likely just think that it's mainly about managing the entire ecosystem of the individual with food and social interaction and like an all-encompassing holistic approach as as uh yogary is what people may think holistic is it really isn't um and that compliance factor is likely the biggest driver here of yeah success both in athletic development uh but obviously also in managing long-term weight loss clients because that's where this industry has failed miserably uh because we haven't got management systems in play to make this more sustainable because we do still have a lot of individuals that are saying this is how you lose weight and no one's really teaching the whys the hows and the management systems yeah and i think that's something i've been actually been working on on my whiteboard back here on some systems of how to initiate a diet then how to get through the middle of it and then kind of the exit strategy and one of the one of the quotes that i got from somebody who i've always had a lot of respect for which is dr not dr johnny balton who's a PhD in nutrition. He says that you should make like the weight loss journey should be like driver's ed for the maintenance. So it should be you're teaching them that this is how you're living for the rest of your life. So we need to find something that you can live with. It doesn't suck. And then understand that you know sometimes you need to speed on the highway but you don do that a lot or you get caught So if you going to overeat a little bit and speed on the highway that all right Just make sure it not enough to get caught And the majority of the time you need to make sure you make a full stop and you turn right and use your indicators and that type of thing. So they should be getting educated through this process that there is no end to what you're doing right now. there was a beginning but this is how you need to be doing for the rest of your life if you want to stay the way you know the way you want to look you know and then at least for the gen pop i mean we know with physique stuff it's a little bit different because you're going to to get to extremely low levels of uh of lean body mass you're going to have to do very extreme things that aren't particularly healthy um so but you which means you need an even bigger emphasis on exit strategy for that type of stuff. For sure. Right now, me and coach Shannon are working on a post comp prep program to help people organize their exit strategy and kind of understand where the pitfalls are. But Shannon actually wrote a book on this subject called Life After Dieting, a guide to informed eating. And we coined the term informed eating, meaning using the dieting process to be informed with nutrition, what your body needs, how you can get there, what works for or it doesn't work for you. And then we put away the food diaries. We put away like all the numerical data, the food scales, and then we just practice those habits that we've built up and using your informed decisions to eat for the rest of your life. So if anyone's interested in that book, Life After Dieting. Because it's for sure the hardest thing. The people that have tracked to learn generally hit a, you know, a big hurdle where they then don't know how to not track. they lose things they lose interoceptive feedback and awareness they don't understand mindfulness it's now just become a calculated game and that's what that whole thing is designed around is trying to manage the exit so that it becomes sustainable for life it's um life after there is a life after you see i like i actually i love to track my food which is a weird thing to say because for me, it gives me a feeling of power and control, and it keeps me on track. And, you know, some people might say, well, that sounds like an eating disorder. Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like I'm not using tracking for dieting. I just track all the time because I like data. So I want to see if I eat 3,000 calories, what does that do to my body? If I eat keto, what does that do to my body? If I eat high carb, because I've been playing with this shit for shit, man, since I was 18 years old. What's the best diet then, Luke? You know, the best diet is one that allows you to not binge and get the best results. For me, I'll tell you, for me, it is a lower-carb diet. And then maybe like some cyclical refeeds and things like that works really well for me. And, you know, like you were saying, Dean, earlier about like how people feel. Like I can feel because I use performance as a factor. So if I'm doing Brazilian jujitsu, which is kind of my new love, if I go low carb for a few days, I know that on about day four, I know I'm going to start doing the Ricky Bobby thing. Like, I don't know what to do with my hands thing. And I can tell because I'm on the mat and I'm like, I'm getting destroyed and I have no wind. That's when I know I need a refeed. Like, and so it, but to be able to, to be able to eat like that means that you have a very high level of subconscious competence and you have a very high intuition towards eating. This is what drives me crazy with all these intuitive eaters these days, the anti-diet culture. It's all intuitive eating. It's like, listen, motherfucker, if you don't know how food works, you can't be intuitive. Like, because if you're intuitive, you intuitively want to put a fucking hamburger and a pizza down your fucking gullet, you know? So you have to go for a period of time somehow tracking something, whether that's taking pictures for your coach, whether that's using your hands, whether that's using a scale, and then learning how to balance out a plate, that type of thing. I mean, it's very true. The intuitive eating and all the rest of it is still the same now as like every other strategy of food management or food psychological management is a misalignment with the true roots of where it comes from, which is actually why we coined the term informed because we do come from a tracking background and then we're saying consciously be aware and be intentional in your decisions. And you're doing that through the education and through the learning that you've gone through to know about food. Whereas actual intuitive eating, trademarked version, very different, but we have a bunch of people out there that are, again, just taking what they see as a protocol and going, this is what you should do, and fucking it up for everybody. Well, intuitive eating, I think, is very confused because people think it's another way to digest

whereas intuitive eating is actually weight neutral. If you happen to lose weight when you do it, then so be it. If you gain weight, then so be it. But with every other form of, like, nutrition approach generally, you do have a weight goal in mind, whether that's weight gain or weight loss or weight maintenance, like whatever. So it is kind of standing alone there. Not to say it's good or bad. I think it's misunderstood. It is wrong, and people just need to fucking realise that they need to read from the front of the cover to the back of the cover before they start to implement the strategies that they don't understand. Yeah, 100%. It's like if it fits your macros and flexible dieting first came out, then everybody was just trying to fit whatever the fuck they could in there. And for weight gain and weight loss, that works. That does work. It's just it might not be the healthiest thing. And then everybody got into the good foods versus bad foods. Like this is like the superpowers fighting each other or whatever. fucking the cold war and russia and the u.s or whatever it's like we got into these demonizing all these foods and i'm like look man i mean like you're getting something you're getting something out of the food right like so like you're looking at like six basic nutrients that you need every day like even if i'm eating donuts i'm still getting some protein carbs and fats and water and maybe even a tiny little bit of fiber so i'm covering like i'm covering like four of those essential nutrients right so it's more more to the saying of like beneficial more beneficial versus less beneficial sources of energy right which is kind of what we're looking for right but there's a man there's a lot of crazy marketing shit that i can't stand in the industry like with a nutrition some of that stuff we've been talking about with weight lifting for me it's fucking reps and reserve and rpe i can't fucking stand it i can't fucking stand it because most people that you train haven't trained long enough or intensely enough to even understand what a fucking 10 rpe is or how many reps they have left in reserve until you squat into the point where you fall now that's there you just hit a 10 right most people have never gotten there so we'll we use different things for that structure but i i'm gonna go insane if i see one more fucking person post about reps in reserve or rpe and the majority of the people who are posting about it are people who are already very well seasoned lifters but for me it's like that's doing a disservice to the people who need our help the most which are people who can barely chew and walk gum and don't know how to squat correctly man it is true like you got time and a place yeah like where where that uh rir came from is from a very iq driven cerebral lifter in in mike you know like yeah gets it because he's come through college performance and he knows what that... Talking about Mike Israetel. He knows what the folded squat feels like because he's done it multiple times. I like RP and RR if it's appropriately implemented. It can be a really good strategy, but I'm also dealing with people that are, again, very mentally attuned to how they feel and what failure is like. I can tell you right now, if us three went to the gym and we were all training, we could all probably watch each other look and go, you've got two more reps left. Right. We can probably, like, I can watch somebody warm up and I know, I know what their one or a max is going to be while I watch them warm up. Like I know I can calculate all this shit because I've spent two decades doing it. Like you guys too. Right. And you guys know, like you're lifting, you're like, all right, I got one and like three eighths of one left. And you're like, you get that one and you go, Oh yeah, there you go. So I got one on a partial, but yeah, most people we're, we're not the norm we're the outliers we're the we're the 15 percent way out there on the on the extreme side of the bell curve right it is true it's very hard to um to verbalize my warm-up to achieve my working weight to people like i do 25 of something then i do 10 then i do two then i do two then i do one and as i'm doing that i'm essentially using you know how that tension and weight feels to calculate how many more kilos I can put on to achieve a given amount of reps that's nine reps away from my current weight. Oh, that's hard to coach. You know? And they're like, what? Like, you mean there's no method? And I'm like, well, no, I'm getting feedback. I'm sensing, you know, feedback. Yeah. Plugging that into the calculator that is the brain. And that is true. That only comes with it. See, for me, because I was a power lifter before I did any type of physique stuff. So for me, everything's all mathematics. it's all a numbers game so for me it's like that just so that the people listening can understand the mentality of like warm-ups between two different high-level coaches for me it's like 50 for five 60 for five 70 for four 80 for three then i might do a couple of 90 at like one or two reps And then I jump into my first work set Or if I doing I may even do some post tannic facilitation or potentiation by I might actually warm up to over my work weight. So I might actually work up to 110% over what my first work set is going to be. So then when I go to my work set, my nervous system is ramped up. I tend to be a really fast twitch, high nervous system dominant, like strength athlete. So it takes me a long time to get the nervous system to wake up. But you're pyramiding your weight and reps, right? So if you're doing 110% for five reps, your working set will be like eight or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So if, let's say, let's say if I'm benching, say one, I'm going to bench say like one. 180. I think it was 180. 180. I wish I was, I could still do 180. Let's say I do 120 for a set of five. I might work up to like 127 and a half. And then I'd give myself like eight or nine minutes of rest, and then I'd begin the warm-up. Right. And you just do like a single or a double? No, for that warm-up, yeah, just a single, just a single. You know, I've thought about playing around with really super max, like seeing what would happen if I – because I've got weight releasers. what would happen if I did like a 10 second 140 percent super max eccentric and then gave myself like 15 minutes and then worked out and see what happened but I haven't got I don't have the nuts to do it yet I'm still too scared to do it so please film it yeah it's a really interesting concept that I've certainly um found it to be something I've enjoyed I used to do it back in the day with pressing off a pause work up to a heavy above the working on a pause and then put it on like normal and then use some recall and a lighter weight and it's just like fuck man is there a rubber band attached to this yeah but i'm also like you though i can only kind of do that a couple of times and then i just gas out i'm 100 like a sprint and drop guy like man if you're training hard you need all of that rest because some people might be listening to you saying five or six minutes rest, eight or nine minutes rest and thinking, what the fuck? I have a client who emailed me less than a week ago and she said, Oh, just so you know, in between sets, I've been skipping with my skipping rope to keep my heart rate up. I know that's just kind of how I felt. And I had to kind of break down why we need that rest and why it's so important. Um, and I, can we break that down right now? Sure. Do you want to, do you want to unravel that a little? Yeah, look, um so you've got different systems that you need to rest right so you've got metabolic systems and you've got neurological systems okay so those are the two main things you're thinking about so the higher reps you do you're thinking more metabolic things so we're recycling atp the body's energy currency so when you're doing lower reps you have to replenish more it's more creatine phosphate but that that doesn't really it doesn't take that long to replenish that because it never really breaks down below you know 50 60 percent so um you know you're talking like two to three minutes you've you've pretty much topped up about 90 of your creatine phosphate right so i like to do i almost always do antagonistic pairings so i'm either going to do like a push with a pull or a squat with a knee flexion or upper lower so i might do a squat with pull up so that you get actually get almost complete as much as you can recover from creatine phosphate. But when you're doing the really high rep, the really low reps, despite the energy flux that you're trying to manage, the energy substrate, you're also trying to manage your nervous system. So you're looking at, like, I've got to manage central and peripheral fatigue via my brain going, okay, what the fuck is this guy doing? Holy shit. Your brain doesn't know that you're doing this to get a 200-kilo squat. Your brain thinks you're wrestling a fucking gorilla, right? So your brain is going to limit your body from doing things that you're doing so that you don't hurt yourself, right? Which is like when we look into things like different forms of maximal strength, or we might be talking about absolute strength and relative strength, and then the one that a lot of people don't talk about, which is limit strength, which is that the strength you can't really tap into consciously. That's the story of the grandmother pulling the call off of her kid and then ripping every tendon off of her bone. That's that strength that, you know, you're basically your GTOs and some of your organelles will, will control that so that you can only contract your muscles at a certain amount because any more than this might lead to injury. Like, like I said, like ripping a muscle or ripping a tendon. But the closer you are to that, the more rest you're going to need to allow the nervous system to calm down enough to then potentiate another reaction in the muscle or another contraction And then there some other things going on Like if you looking at more peripheral fatigue you looking more thinking about like a single choline release from the end of an axon. You're thinking about calcium and the relationship between calcium and phosphate. Okay. And how fast calcium is being recycled through circa between the sarcoplasmic interplasmic reticulum. I'm sorry. I need some more coffee now. Shit. and the tropomyosin or the troponin, right? So there's a lot of things going on peripherally that we have to manage. pH level from hydrogen ions, excessive amounts of phosphate binding to calcium, inability to recycle acetylcholine. So that's from a chemical side and an electrochemical side, but then you've also got the brain portion too that you have to recover from, which is, you know, that can take eight minutes if you're doing a really, really heavy lift. if you're doing something super maximal there's a reason why power lifters think right now that quarantine is just a rest period for them right so that's the thing like they rest a lot because you need that and the stronger you get the more rest you need it was difficult explaining the ins and outs of that in an email to a gen pop client um especially if you explain it like i just did yeah there was a lot of like three syllable and above words there um i i basically just said to her, you're not just trying to keep your heart rate up to burn X amount of calories within a session. If you were skipping between sets, it would be helpful to be burning more calories. We're using that rest period so that you can repeat your performance. And what if you're not resting between sets, your performance is going to go down. And we know that there's a really strong relationship between performance and muscle growth. So yeah, I kind of wrapped it up in a really pedestrian bow. I mean, what they what they have to understand is like you're looking at, okay, you've got these switches in the body, and depending on what you do, they turn switches on or they turn switches off. It's just like a light switch. So if I'm doing weightlifting, the goal is to increase mechanical tension. The goal is to increase some metabolic fatigue and metabolic waste buildup and build inflammation that I then have to recover from. And most of that, for most things that you would be doing for your clients, most of that would be anaerobic in nature, correct? Because what is the outcome of what we're doing is I'm wanting to build more muscle, and then I'm probably going to want to get stronger because I'm putting on more cross-sectional muscle mass. That's fantastic. In order to do that, we need to do the things that cause the adaptations and the switches to be turned on for that. And if you're skipping in between lifting, you're impairing your ability to switch those, to turn those switches on harder. Right? So your results are going to be subpar. So you can skip. I like that. But we're going to skip in a separate session. yeah we might skip before you work out we might do skipping as a warm-up or something like that or we might just do it as a separate session but you're you're i would be embarrassed if one of my clients was that person that was doing a leg extension and then skipping next to the leg extension you always see them but they're still not as bad as the guys who shadow box on the gym for oh my god i love these guys are the worst i know yeah i um i've likened the switch for so many different analogies but uh i think in this instance we could say that uh if you try and skip in between what you end up doing is pausing the switch of training and it sits in a constant flicker like you never turn the light on you never let it turn off you just fuck with the switch and mess with the electrical power and may as well do a boot camp yeah you're just you're just sitting in neutral you can't see properly you're probably going to have a stroke because of because of the seizure that you're going to get from the light switch that's flicking on and off but and one other thing that you said there luke that that training is all anaerobic dominant which is true uh and i went on about this the other day on my social and that is that you require an aerobic base in order to maximize anaerobic potential which is another reason why all the big buffets out there should do a little bit of typical aerobic based training yeah well you know just going off the back of that you think about where do we get most of our strength and conditioning information it's like who who's probably this is without a doubt the person who's had the majority of the influence on most of what we've done with strength and conditioning it's not naming hay how for cardio no i don't know it's going to be arnold if you look at bodybuilding it's going to be arnold and if you look at snc you gotta you gotta mention charles paul yeah that's a fact like where do you agree with everything like he and I had our disagreements and you know we had our friendship and then we had our issues toward the end but I know thousands of coaches who wouldn be doing this if it hadn been for his influence right I forgot where I was going with that Like he was one of the guys that was very anti right And unfortunately, he passed away, you know, recently within the last, like, I think it was last year or the year before from a heart attack, a stirred heart attack. And he and I used to have a conversation. He was young, too. What was he, like? 50, maybe? Yeah, like 40s? 54, 55. I can't remember anymore, but, um, you know, we, we had our disagreements on doing the cardiovascular work and, uh, you know, that you just, the whole thing was just get stronger. And it was all based on, um, a professor and I, I, his last name's always fucks me up, but professor Dietmar Schmidt, it's like Schmidt lecture. I don't fucking, I don't know. There's too many fucking consonants, not in the vowels. Right. So he's a, he's a professor and he talks mainly about like speed and power development, right. And athletic development. And he has a quote that Charles loved to quote, which was strength is the mother of all qualities. Okay. I get that. If we're talking about speed and power production, absolutely. So, but, but just getting stronger is not going to make you a better athlete, right? If you're, if you're bodybuilding and we'll use athlete tongue in cheek with body builders no we never call it that so yeah we're not it's not we're we're building a beauty pageant yeah that's it we're physique artists right we're physique sculptors but um they're competing in the hunger olympics there you go yeah yeah who can do who can who can handle the most work on the least amount of food for the longest period of time it is it's like the survivor tank it's like at wit at last outplay except all you do is just outlast that's it uh but like if you look at like when you're looking at like speed and power yeah you you need you have to have a certain base level of strength to then express that strength in a time domain of velocity and power and all that type of thing and acceleration um but you still have to be able to produce that repeatedly over and over and over if you're an mma and you're a conor mcgregor and your shoulders are gassed by the second middle of the second round you got another three and a half rounds to go this is not going to be a good time for you right because you're deconditioned globally and locally so i came up with to counteract that i came up with one that where i say aerobics is the mother of all conditioning qualities right you're as my wife is uh off to say the aerobic system is your pathway for life. So why would you not want to make that as robust as possible? Like that's what helps keep everything running really nicely. Um, and that potentiates your anaerobic work. So if I have a broad aerobic base, my anaerobic work is going to be much better and it's much more repeatable and I don't need as much rest to do it, which means what's the, what's the key, one of the key tenants of fat loss density i can build more density i can do giant sets and i'm not getting tired i can do drone to eight by eight and i'm not getting tired i'm just fucking cranking out work output over time well i can only do that if i'm in shape if i'm not in shape i can't do that and then secondary to that too like in in the rest phase you you've got a higher affinity to beta oxidation more fat loss like yeah it's just so many wins to having a solid aerobic base but I just think there's, again, like a lot of dogma and a lot of fear behind because everybody just fucking puts up the picture of the marathon runner and goes, this is what it looks like when you run. And then they put up like the rock and go, this is what it looks like when you lift weights. No, no, this is what happens when you have an islander father and you take anabolic steroids and lift lots of weights. God, it's crazy, no? I reckon he's my free pass. The rock, I approve. My free pass. You know what? If I had a list of kind of like if I was gay, these are dudes I would do, The Rock would be on there and probably Denzel Washington. That Aquaman guy? No wonder we get along. He's my favorite actor of all time. He's the man. He's the man. I really like Mark Wahlberg movies too, but then the other day I was on his Instagram and he went hella Jesus on it and I was like, ah. Have you ever seen, okay, Mark Wahlberg, what was the movie he was in? was it fear where he was dating this chick and like he was a psychopath that they didn't know oh you got it i'll find it and i'll send it to you but it's funny because at one point like he's he's talking to the girl's father who doesn't approve and apparently he's like um he's taking the girl's virginity at this point he's also like done something else to the guy like driven this this pride car that he had that no one's ever driven and he looks at him he goes now i've pop both your cherries or something like that. And at that point I was like, Oh damn, Mark Wahlberg is fucking savage. Yeah.

that's funny um mr luke we appreciate your time but we know it's a finite resource so we might start with our wrap-up questions if you don't mind okay but first because uh we have talked a little bit about cardio and all the rest of it our tagline as we told you at the beginning of this is how to be less shit so if somebody wants to like take a basic framework of how to build some aerobic fitness what does that conceptually look like if they want to be less shit from a not dying quality okay so so kind of reader's digest version is first you have to realize how much time do you have because time is time is the one thing you can't buy so how much time do you have how much can you dedicate to it the easiest lowest hanging fruit is just your standard steady state aerobics you put a heart rate strap on and you walk on an incline for 120 to 130 beats and you do it for as long as you can handle. Joel Jamison says a minimum of 30 minutes. I would tend to agree with that. I would say the more you do up front, the faster you get the adaptation, so that's the best. If you're in quarantine and you've got three or four more weeks and you can do 90 minutes of aerobics a day, fucking do it. Just put something on your TV. I know that sounds extreme to people, but the thing is we're doing such low-intensity work that you need a lot of high volume because volume and intensity have an inverse relationship, right? So the higher intense I go, the less stuff I can do. The lower intense, the more I'm going to need to listen to adaptations. So for a lot of people that are stuck at home, if you've got a treadmill, just stick the movie Fear with Mark Wahlberg in and walk and just watch the whole movie and just walk on an incline, right? And you'll usually see massive benefits within three weeks of that. So it's very high return on investment, but it does take a lot of investment capital up front. Now, if you don't have time for that, now we have to look at things. How do I increase work output but also make it aerobic in nature? So let's say 30-second sprints with four-minute rest, okay, the majority of that workout you would be recovering in an aerobic zone despite 30 seconds being glycolytic in nature. so you'd have some global and local glycolytic work for 30 seconds but then you'd have complete rest for four minutes so that the sum total would be mainly aerobic with some anaerobic benefit as well so that those would be easy ways of doing it monitoring your heart rate my my goal for most people is to get their heart rate somewhere in the 50s i think 50 resting heart rate is excellent It shows you have a pretty high VO2 max. What's it sitting at? I hit 48 the other day. Currently, today's 58, but I've also – That's it? I had half a liter of coffee this morning. So to be 58 and a half a liter deep, I'm good. That's pretty good, right? I was sitting at like 50-something yesterday after like 8 milligrams of nicotine and like six espressos. So I was doing pretty good. That's why you also like Broderick. Oh, yeah. 100%. So the thing is like the lower your heart rate is resting heart rate. So I like that kind of in the middle of the day, the lower that is and the higher your maximum heart rate is, the better your VO2 max is. It means you oxidize better. You can test this, run as hard as you can on a treadmill for 12 minutes, monitor it with a heart rate strap. How high can you get that? You want that to be as high as possible. You want your resting heart rate to be low as possible. So if you have somebody who's sitting at like, say right now, my maximum heart rate is 190. my resting heart rate's around 56 57 that gives me a vo2 max somewhere around 50 okay pretty good not that good for me so i'm now doing more cardio work because i like to be closer to 60 i just feel better that way eat a lot more food uh think better too one of the benefits of aerobic training people don't think about is the benefits on the brain so when you do aerobic work it increases blood flow to the brain and it increases uh brain derived nootrophic factor which increases synapse connections and increases brain activity, especially in areas that you don't normally use. So it actually makes you smarter, which is why when people say hashtag fuck cardio, I use that as a fucking IQ test that they're, they're fucking Neanderthal. Yep. So 30 minute sessions, 20 to 30 minutes, somewhere around 120 to 130 beats of heart rates of heart rates. That's good English. How's that for a Neanderthal comment? as many sessions as you possibly can get done. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like, it doesn't really matter. Right. So like, you know, version of exercise. So long as you are stabilizing, stabilizing, doesn't matter. I mean, you could do, like I was telling, I have a, one of my staff members is living with us right now. She she came up from New South Wales to stay with us for a bit when we got the gym open So now she actually stuck with us So now she has to live with us So we got a pretty badass home gym And I just brought a concept two rower and a spin bike. And so she's doing a lot of aerobic conditioning right now to lose weight and to improve her health markers. And she asked me the same thing, like, do you care what I do? I go, I don't give a shit what you do, as long as your heart rate stays where or want it to stay because I'm working on the heart and vascular system. I'm not working on what's going on with your legs or your arms or anything else. I'm looking at just global conditioning stuff. So if you want to do five minutes on the row or 15 minutes on the spin bike, you want to go run around the block. I don't give a shit. I just, just sustain your heart rate and the range I'm wanting for the time period I'm wanting. And I'm super happy with that. Later we'll talk about more specific localized conditioning, which is going to be, we're going from a level of general training to more specificity, which means that if she decided she wanted to say, I don't know, play AFL on the weekends, then we would start doing specific conditioning for the legs and things. Yeah. For anyone that doesn't have any equipment at all, our home gym is limited to a few resistance bands and I think like a hundred kilos of weight. So like nothing. Yeah. I the other day stood in front of the TV and ran on the spot while I watched a movie. Like that's, you don't need any equipment. You just need like a bit of, I don't know, no shame and a bit of creativity. She has no shame. The same for me, man. Like last night I ran a 25-minute session and I actually just was referencing heart rate for where I was sitting in ranges. And it was just back and forth between a push and a pull of some description, varied exercises. It really wasn't there for hypertrophy. It was just making work. Yeah. And the one thing I would say that I've found, especially in my quite unique population of primary bodybuilders, is that if you set a mode specific to them that they can't actually get their heart rate up to because they do have localized fatigue from a lactate point of view, like say sitting on a bike, then it is important that you do shift that exercise out and you don't have to do cardio. So like I'm going to actually have one of my guys soon just essentially run like a full body weight circuit with like over the shoulder med balls. Yeah. Because he cannot handle doing bike work and getting his heart rate to where it needs to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because when you're talking about like that kind of local versus global conditioning, like in a lot of cases, they haven't done enough of the conditioning work to build the enzymes locally to manage the bioenergetics. So even though their heart's handling it, not their heart is maybe like really far ahead of their musculature, where it's like now I have to go a lot harder to get my heart rate up. But I haven't built the mechanics in the musculature of the legs to facilitate that. Now my legs are on fire. I'm building up too much lactate. Okay, that's the goal was to keep that down because mitochondria don't like that very much. And when you're doing that, what you're showing is that you cannot buffer hydrogen ions anymore. You're losing that ability. So there's a lot of reasons why that could be. It could be low NAD, so it could be a low amount of B3 or activated B3. It could be the fact that you just don't have a lot of mitochondria. So acetyl-CoA will tend to build the mitochondria, which shuts down pyruvate from getting in the mitochondria. If pyruvate can't get in the mitochondria, it has to go somewhere else, so you can reduce that with hydrogen. There's a lot of things going on in all different directions. And so in a lot of cases, you might have to say, well, you know, while this exercise was great for you the first three weeks, now your heart has gotten so badass that your legs can't handle it, so we've got to find something else for you to do. right because from a bodybuilding perspective you could have him go harder on the bike but then that that may fatigue his legs for a squat session so you know you'd hit you'd hit a place where it's a law diminishing returns and actually counterproductive to what they're wanting to do with what training really matters to say a bodybuilder which is getting fucking bigger yeah yeah a quick little story and then we'll get onto the something worth sharing about if you look to explain this in actual in actual action uh at the end when i my soccer career my last season i was fortunate enough to be at uni and i did a vo2 max on the treadmill now i was a soccer player it's a running man's game yeah that vo2 max that i achieved on there with a lactate threshold my vo2 max was 67 and my lactate threshold was like what it like into the sort of low to mid range 80 percenters like super specific to my sport a week later i did the same vo2 max but on a bike and i only managed to get a vo2 max of 55 because my legs just absolutely fried from that build-up of hydrogenizing talking about and now gas my lungs are fine i'm like but i couldn't keep up the repetition necessary to complete the test so i otherwise was like what fucking 20 percent reduced capacity from a VO2 testing point of view because of the specificity of fatigue Yeah, I mean, you're looking at when you're running, you've got some deceleration happening. You've got a little bit more blood flow. The minute you get on the bike, you've got a bit of occlusion going on. It's high-intensity continuous training. So you never really get a relief from that continuous contraction. so and that that that it goes to showcase um specificity and everything that we do like because you're good at one modality you might not be good at something else so when we teach testing we teach a lot of testing in our courses you have to use the test that somebody's already pretty good at if i and you and then that has to be the test you always test against so if i do a cooper's test on someone and we're going to modify it because maybe they don't they're not a good runner maybe they're good at the rower okay i'm going to modify we're going to use the rower as the standard but then the rower always has to be what we use every time we test it because if they get up and run there's no deceleration component and it's like a centric deceleration in a rower there's no um there's no isokinetic activity to running like you have on a rower with the air display so there's a lot of different things that you have to keep like an apple to an apple and an orange to one orange. Yeah, absolutely. I did a stress test for as part of a study in when I was living in Austin at University of Texas. This is back when I was just doing strongman and power lifting. And so they same thing I didn't run at the time, they put me on a treadmill, I think I achieved somewhere around a 54 to 56 vo two max being a strength athlete. And they were surprised or like, you don't run. I'm like, I don't run, man. I do heavy weighted carries. And I do all this you know alice stones and i do all this other shit and they're like wow that's pretty amazing for vo2 max for somebody who doesn't actually run um but uh but you know what it wasn't the i wasn't gassed my legs couldn't handle it anymore like because i just didn't the incline got to a point my legs just went fuck off my heart and my lungs were still fine so you know but that's why that's why you got to be careful when you look at research because you never know how they've, you know, what they're researching may not actually be applicable to some of the stuff we're doing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, Luke, to start off the segments, we are going to begin with asking you if you have something worth sharing. And typically it's a book or a movie or something, but it can be whatever you like, a podcast, a course, a quote. Okay. Okay, so, all right. I'll give you a quote. Can I give you a couple of things? Yeah, totally. Shoot. I'll give you a quote. This is my quote. Stephen Covey, seek first to understand, then be understood. Okay, so that's how we write our courses. If you want your client to understand how their body's working, if you want to understand how to understand your client's body, you have to seek to understand things first yourself before you can teach others, right? Especially nowadays when everybody's trying to be an educator and nobody knows shit. Like you got fucking kids who have been training people for a year and a half and now they're fucking teaching courses like what the show me your portfolio what the fuck have you done you're fucking 19 fuck off right um another thing i'm big on is you know methods are great but you need to understand the madness behind the methods so a very good thing to do is make sure you start at that foundational level learn how the body works for fuck's sake like all that stuff in the cert three, four that you just glaze through, you know, and everybody glazes through it. When you look at like, Hey, let's look at a sarcomere and let's look at the Z discs and look at where tropically where, which zone that the actin and the monosyn are cross bridging on. And everybody just goes right past that. So none of these trainers know how muscle actually contracts. They don't know anything about, so the electrochemical gradient and what happens. And they don't, to me, this stuff is inherently important to understand when you're writing a program. And if you're not, you're just shitting in your hands and throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks. So learn your biology, learn your biochemistry. You don't need to learn it. Like you're not trying to become a fucking college professor, but you need to understand it enough to know if I do this many sets, this many reps of this kind of rest in this time of retention, this is what I should predict the outcome to be. If I match that with this type of dieting, this is how I should predict the outcome to be and you should be pretty close but the only way to know that is if you actually know how the fucking cell works and how the body works at a basic you know but that very basic level i guess that would be like a car mechanic not understanding how cars work and just kind of like putting two pipes together yeah you know you gotta it like hey i know how to put gas in my car So therefore I now a mechanic No you not Yeah Fuck You know you got to know where the doohickey fits in the flange doodle. I love it. Now, is there a weird hobby or habit that you have that may surprise the listeners? Uh, it's chronic masturbating. Is that a hobby? That's not weird though. I think we're all there with you, Luke. Oh, good. I'm actually glad you're doing that. You know, I don't, man, I don't really. Let me think about that. Yeah, like, shit, man, my whole life revolves around this and Zoe and the dogs. Okay, I'll tell you something people might not know about me. I love musicals, and I love ballet, and I love going to plays. And Zoe hates all that shit. And so. Same here. Shame on you, Zoe. I hate all that shit too and Dean's always wanting to go to a musical and I'm like why? I'm an appreciator of talent you guys can go together, me and Zoe will be so fun I'm a talent appreciator especially when there's a talent that seems to be one that slumps someone given to them and then they just fucking skyrocket it especially if it's a talent that you can't do I can't sing so when I see a bunch of people on stage singing and dancing at the same time and it's beautiful I'm like, it blows my mind, right? Dude, one of the greatest things I've still ever seen is Billy Elliot live in Melbourne. Oh, really? Yeah. Probably. We just saw Elton John on his last tour. That was pretty amazing. But I'll tell you, probably the most amazing person I've ever seen sing is Michael Bublé. And I've seen him twice. And there's no pyrotechnics. There's no craziness. He just sings. and women are like and like ripping their clothes off and shit. And I'm like, and he's just, he's just like, it's the super coolest concert because that and George Strait, who you guys, do you even know who George Strait is? He is like the mat daddy of all country music, especially old country music. George, I've seen him twice and he just stands in the middle of the stage, plays his guitar and sings. And it sounds just like, it just sounds like you're listening to a CD. And it's just amazing. So that stuff blows my mind. Yeah. You and Dean should totally go on mandates to the ballet. Although really, I would link on with you. Why are we supposed to go to Book of Mormon? But I think I was out of the country. Yeah. Tickets and everything. And then you bowed. We really cut. We cried a lot all night. That would be, that would be the second time I saw it. And it's fucking amazing. Reluctantly went along. I think I went along only because I think, I think because you did it. I think, yeah, I think I took you to, I don't know. You, You and Zoe couldn't go, and then Will and Nikki also randomly – From Nexus Performance. Yeah, they booked a trip to do a seminar in New Zealand. They forgot because we booked that shit like six months in advance. Anyways, I went along, and it was actually incredible. It was because I think that knocking things that I don't support is kind of funny. So Book of Mormons was hilarious to me. Like really offensive to religious people, but like really funny for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm okay with being offensive to religious people. So I'm okay with that. No comment. No comment. All right. So I was going to say, is now the time when we sing the main line? No, we don't. No. Oh, my God. Two questions for you. The two last questions. It's your final 24 hours on earth. How do you spend it? Oh, God. Probably being as offensive and offending as many people as I can while spending as much time with Zoe and the dogs as I can. That's probably it. I don't think I'd change anything to be honest. Like, um, yeah, I think I would just do, I love my life. Like I don't feel the need to do anything else. So like, like I said, like I said, when we first started, I got everything. I got everything I've wanted out of life so far. It's been a lot of hard fucking work, but like, I've got a great life. I've got a great wife who doesn't, uh, basically lets me do whatever the fuck I want. Um, trust me. I trust her. We never fight. We think out of five years, we fought twice like fucking it's a great relationship i've got three badass dogs um a badass chihuahua that won't stop pissing and shitting in the house that's one thing but the other other than that he's the coolest dog ever and he's got this weird thing he likes shitting on like electrical things what's that that is weird so yeah so like anytime i go into my cinema room where I have all the plugs for the chairs and everything. He shits on top of that on like the little outlet extender and he poops on that. And I don't know what the fetish is with that thing, but. That's because he knows that you're risking your life to clean it with water.