Episode 5 - Luke Leaman Health performance and not fucking yourself up in the gym

# Episode 5 - Luke Leaman Health performance and not fucking yourself up in the gym

**Channel:** The Performance Hub Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

Hey guys and welcome to the Performance Hub podcast and thanks for tuning in. So before we get started we want to let you guys know about an amazing offer we have going at the moment. Using the coupon code COMMUNITY we have one month's free access to the Performance Hub. So this is our online member site where we have tons of content from in-depth exercise tutorials, videos on different strength and conditioning methods, program templates, articles on nutrition, stress management and just a ton more content. So head over to www.pipeperformance.uk to sign up and get started on that today. As well as that below this video we've linked all our social media channels as well as all of our guest socials so go and like and comment and share as it really helps us to be able to produce more content for you guys like the interview that we had today. Okay, so that's enough of that. Let's dive into today's interview and see what it's all about. Hey guys and welcome to the Performance Hub podcast. So today we've got an amazing guest. It is Luke Lehman from the Muscle Nerds. Luke has been in the industry for a long time now and has amassed an incredible amount of knowledge about health, well-being, strength training, fitness everything that we kind of try to address every area that we that we try and help people with he really is you know I would say an expert I came in contact with Luke through the muscle nerds courses that they run and attended the foundations course and was absolutely blown away by the level of detail and the level of information that they provided over three days about everything that we do with our clients you know from ensuring that we maintain their health and the impact of everything that we do on on the kind of down to a cellular level you know every type of exercise that we use with them every diet intervention every stress management strategy like how is this impacting on our physical health you know when we talk about managing stress and it's going to be good for you and it'll bring your blood pressure down well let's go into that and let's really dig into that and what is actually happening on a cellular level and this stuff just it blew my mind that you know really i'm definitely going to be going back onto that course and taking theo with me because it's such an incredible course and i feel like i can do it five times over and still come away with new information every time I do the course. So I wanted to bring Luke on to the podcast for you guys because he is a literal mine of information about all things to do with the personal training and strength training and strength and conditioning, eating well, losing weight, everything that we do with people. He is going to give you some brilliant insights, and I can't wait to go through some of this stuff with him. Like I said, I could sit here and waffle about it all day because I think he's such a great guy and he's had such a positive influence on my career. So let's really dig into the interview. I've got a list of questions from you guys that I'm going to ask him as well as the stuff that I want to speak to him about. Welcome, Luke. Thanks for joining us on the Performance Hub podcast. Really, in the words of Bernardo Farrier, it's a huge honour to have you here. um it's that's a jiu-jitsu joke by the way for people listening um what um so look we I first came kind of in contact with you through the the muscle nerds like um foundation course that I attended and was blown away by the kind of level of content and information uh that you provided around health and well-being and fitness and getting stronger and how basically to help all our clients with that stuff and just not fuck them up um yeah maybe a lot of people are doing or a certain amount of people are doing hopefully it's getting better um but how did you kind of get to that point if you want to tell us a bit about your kind of background how you arrived at where you are today with the muscle nerds yeah i guess you know just in a kind of reader's digest version um you know i've been lifting weights and being in sports since i was a little kid so i i started lifting weights when I was around eight years old, right? So I'm originally from Texas. Now I live in Australia. And if you know anything about Texas and high school football, like I was the true Friday night lights where the entire city shuts down and everyone's at the football game. So we start basically getting ready for that when we were little kids. And so I wanted to be a step So I started learning how to lift weights I you know kind of my start was seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian And I saw Conan and I was like that is what a man supposed to look like right And then I looked at my father, who my father was a very small man. He was about five foot seven. And he's not a big jack guy. And I'm thinking, I'm looking at my dad going, well, I'm never going to look like Conan. But then I looked at my mom and my mom's of like German Austrian heritage. She's really tall. And I'm the runt of that side of the family. And I went, okay, so if I lift weights and play my cards right, I might actually be able to do that. And so I started lifting weights basically to put on size for football and, and for martial arts and things. And back then, we didn't, you know, this back in, you know, back in the 80s, we didn't have a lot of access to information like we have now. So I just started the standard, you know, push-ups, curls, squats, and running and things like that. And it just kept developing that. And then in about 1992, I got the internet and that kind of opened everything up to learning about who Charles Poliquin was and Charles Staley and Paul Cech and all these guys that I've learned from over the years. And yeah, I just kind of went head first into it and started a powerlifting team in my high school. um our powerlifting team dominated pretty much everybody the four years i was in high school left high school decided to try my hand at bodybuilding and didn't really like it too much went back to powerlifting went back to physique stuff went went in a strong man so i kind of did all these everything was about strength right and that uh it's it's six foot one and and 220 to 250 pounds depending on how good i'm at my diet and how i'm lifting i'm never going to be a really great runner so I just did what I was good at which was strength and power um and so that's I got to a point where you know I was a at the time a fairly accomplished powerlifter very strong but I could barely walk up the stairs without being out of breath and then I started I went and worked at Pollock and group for a while being one of the lead instructors and at some point I just had this epiphany that man maybe we've got things all wrong. Like strength is just one tool in the box. And I started getting into more of the body weight movement stuff and actually getting my cardiovascular respiratory system into shape. And I started thinking about being more well-rounded. And I think too, like I'm 42 now, you get to a certain point where maybe you're in your late thirties. Some people go out and they buy a Corvette. They have a midlife crisis. My midlife crisis was getting my blood pressure in check because I had stage two hypertension getting my triglycerides and check they were sitting at 400 and they should be under 99 like I had all of these kind of uh coming to Jesus talks with myself about what was important for the second half of my life and for me it was putting my health first and then putting my performance secondary which is something I hadn't done up to that point and so when I left Paulick and group started muscle nerds my wife and I decided that every do would be on the foundation of health first and performance secondary. So, you know, you obviously got, I think you said when we were on the course, you got your squat was over 300 kilos and you got pretty strong, you know, competitive in that respect. But your markers, your BP and, you know, resting heart rate, triglycerides and things like that, your bloods weren't great. You know, do you think if you went back and did it again and did it with your current kind of approach that prioritizes health and building a good aerobic base and things like this, that you could still get that strong or stronger? Or do you think it was a necessary evil having to kind of train in that way to get there? Well, any time, look, whenever you're at the highest level of sport, it's not going to be healthy. But back then, I mean, that was back when powerlifters did no conditioning. There was no such thing as a sled and a prowler. We thought that conditioning was for marathon runners. and you didn't, you know, we didn't do barbell curls because that was for girls. And it was all that type of mentality, right? Yeah. And I think, yeah, if I could, if I could buy a DeLorean and find a flux capacitor and go back in time and have a talking to Jesus talking myself, I probably, I probably would have been an even better power lifter. And I probably could have been, you know, world class power lifter. But, you know, I got to the point where it just wasn't worth having, you know, being in pain and getting winded walking up a flight of stairs it just became to me like I didn't I got to a point where I'm squatting like 318 and I'm dead lifting like you know 333 or so and that that I was the strongest person that almost every gym I went to but I was also not sleeping well I'd sleep apnea you know I couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath I'd be out of breath just sitting there doing nothing And I think if I could go back in time and reteach myself there you can definitely be incredibly strong even elite level strength and still have adequate conditioning for life. And, you know, when we first started muscle nerds, no one was really talking about this, but after teaching foundations around the world a few times, we know lots of power lifters right now who are like some of the top power lifters in Australia that are now saying, hey, you need to do your aerobic work. You need to keep in an adequate level of conditioning to keep these metrics in check so that you don't die. Because if there's one thing that's really horrible for performance, it's dying. That's definitely going to kill performance, which is a concept. That's a concept I got from Broderick Chavez, who's well known for training palifters. and he's also a palestrian a biologist and uh i think yeah there's a you just have to look at how do i how do i balance this stuff out you know if i can get it you know the the hard part is getting where you need to be the easy part is the maintenance so i think if a lot of people will start like really reassessing where they are and saying okay yeah sure i can squat 300 kilos but my blood pressure is 180 over 100 i can probably afford to spend eight weeks getting my blood pressure down without my without my total going down too much my total will actually probably go up even higher if i'm more conditioned because if i'm more conditioned i recover better and i can train harder and i can train with a lot more volume and i can eat a lot more food yeah so so i got like a list of questions but we'll get straight into this one which i was going to do a little bit later but you know i saw or i listened to or watched the the round table that you did uh recently with dr mike t nelson and uh alex vader is it um yeah and it was interesting you you guys were talking about cardio for lifters or aerobic work for power lifters weight lifters things like this and it's often a hard sell when you're working with someone who's just trying to build max strength as to taking a bit of time off of that pursuit and building that aerobic base um so that's something that you would look to do is kind of pull someone back from their kind of strength training if you like and spend some time just focusing on some of that low and slow building building that aerobic capacity yeah and yeah i think one of the problems is people people always look at as it's either this or that okay so it's either i'm going to either lift or I'm going to condition. If you decide that you're going to take health into your hands again, and you're going to do some aerobic work, that's very low intensity work. It's not really going to screw with your recovery. The thing that you have to manage is number one, how much time do you have? If I don't have a lot of time, I've got to take care of what's important. The second thing is I have to feed for nutrition. I have to feed for performance, right? So if I'm going to do more work, I'm going to have to feed myself more food, which a lot of people tend to forget that part. The secondary thing is, it's all about, you know, dose makes the poison, right? So if someone is still powerlifting, or they're a shot putter, or if they're whatever it is, whatever strength sport they're in, it doesn't mean that they need to stop doing that work. They just need to de-emphasize it for a little bit of time and emphasize other qualities. And that's kind of the problem is whenever you're especially if it's a if it's a sport where it's dictated around one big quality like maximal strength um people tend to to go too far to the extreme on that and they start forgetting there's other qualities that they need to uh keep maintained whenever you whenever you're in something where you're really going for one singular type of um quality you're going to have to sacrifice other qualities other places right it's the same thing with with sports performance and getting stronger you know you have one sector of the strength conditioning population to say well you need to get as strong as possible being stronger is always better but that's not actually the case like there is a limit on how strong you need to be for say a certain sport like american football or for soccer or for whatever you need to be just strong enough if you keep trying to get stronger, stronger, and stronger, then where are you going to fit in things like power and speed training, agility, change of direction? You know, there's a lot of other things that you're avoiding because you're glorifying getting your squat higher. Overvaluing, I suppose, that max end number. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you look at like, even like things like Westside style, like what, what Louis Simmons popularized with what he calls conjugate training right If we look at a concurrent training plan you can still go for max lifts There nothing inherently wrong with that But what you probably want to do if you have high blood pressure high resting heart rate, and your metrics are off a little bit, you might just want to spend 20 minutes working up to a good one to five rep max and then maybe do some conditioning off the side of that. Do a couple of accessory movements and add some really easy steady steps. aerobic work at aerobic intervals or something else don't avoid it um because you think that's going to make your total go down or that's going to make you weaker because that that doesn't seem to be the case this is interesting because um i guess block the kind of eastern style block periodization is was traditionally you know really popular um i guess maybe you could say that conjugate is or the west side thing is almost it's got some of that to it but then obviously you have this undulating nature to it but um that concurrent training became much less popular um in kind of the last I don't know 10 or 20 years um but it seems to be coming back now and I think um a chap who I interviewed for the podcast a couple of weeks ago Chris Myers sent me an excerpt from a Dan Baker interview and he was kind of talking about the way maybe MMA is starting to change the way we look at training or strength and conditioning for sports in terms of in MMA we need to use you know aerobic fitness, alactic, lactate, all your you know your energy systems are all going to be heavily needed as well as that max end strength you know and we're they're able to generate and and train all those things seemingly concurrently maybe we can apply that same kind of methodology to the weight room and it seems to be building popularity now just training everything at once and maybe just increasing or decreasing the amount we're focusing on different um you know uh aspects of that yeah i mean that's that's the thing right we we've got different categories of what we're trying to build and what you need to be looking at is what am i the weakest at okay so um if if let's look at like strength let's look at speed and power let's look at conditioning aerobically let's look at anaerobic conditioning so we can we can section that off as force. We can section, section off as velocity. We can section that off as aerobic, um, your aerobic reserve. And then we can section that off or VO two max. And then we can section that off as lactate threshold. Those four things are inherently incredibly important, especially for MMA and fighting arts. You know, a lot, you, you walk into any, um, walk into any jujitsu club and you talk to every single person in there and they're going to say, oh, jujitsu is anaerobic. You don't need to be aerobic. Well, I hate to tell you this, but once you exceed two minutes of activity, it's massively aerobic at that point. This is why you're getting gassed when you're training. If we think about a match is going to be at minimum probably five minutes, okay, what happens if you don't have the stamina to go past two or three minutes? And that's kind of at my last jujitsu tournament, I went into it saying, okay, I'm going to be the strongest, fastest, most well-conditioned fighter. And I'm also going to be the best well-fed because I'm going to plan appropriately. And I dominated it, not because my technique's great, because it's not. My technique, I'm a pressure player. I don't know a lot of chokes. I'm not good at setting things up. I'm not good at submissions. What I'm good at is if I get on top of you, you're screwed because I can get real fucking heavy and I can wear you down until you make a mistake and I'll just score points until the time I'll run the timeout I'm a I'm one of those shady dudes it'll ramp up 21 points on you and then I'll just lay on your ass until the time goes out because you're you're breathing so hard you can't do anything anymore right I love it it is you've got to play on your strengths and I know my strength is strength and conditioning and and nutrition my strength is not my technique um so you know now going forward when we can start doing jujitsu again, my next thing will be getting better at actual jujitsu instead of just using my, uh, my physical abilities to wear, to grind people down. Right. But that's one thing I see too, with a lot of the MMA guys, they're very strong on the mat, but then you take them in the weight room and they're really fucking weak. Like imagine what would happen if you were actually decently strong in the gym and how much that would translate onto the mat, especially if we think about strength being the mother quality for power and speed. Well, if you're the type of fighter that's a very proactive fighter, speed and power is to your benefit. You're not going to be able to produce a lot of speed and power without building a base level of strength. And then you're not going to be able to repeat that strength, power and speed over and over

you don't have the conditioning to survive that. So if you've got, if you got eight fights in a day, you might have two or three really good fights and then you're destroyed. If your conditioning and your, and your nutrition isn't up the par, you're going to have a horrible end of the day fights, which is what I observed at the last tournament I went to. Well, all of these guys were doing massive weight cuts to try to cut down into their category. I actually planned my weight cuts six months out. And so I cut down for six months and I cut down below where I needed to be And then I fed up into my tournament, which was a massive benefit for me. You know, and that's kind of what they need to start. That's what they need to start thinking about. Like the MMA strength conditioning industry is just horrendous. Like you've got a couple of people that actually know what they're doing, but the majority of it's still really old school. And, you know, they're still standing on BOSU balls and, you know, throwing around a fucking band instead of just getting very good at the basic foundational lifts and then throw the silly shit in there once you're decently strong. So it sounds like the value in S&C for combat athletes would be building that aerobic base, building that max-in strength, and then where appropriate or where time appropriate, building some power. And those three things probably being where you're going to get the most return for your investment, really. Yeah, I feel that way. And I mean, that's my competition coach is really about, you know, he's really a very proactive fighter and kind of his method of how he coaches us to fight is to at whatever level your competitor is at, you stay just a little bit higher than that. And when you see them fade out, then you just turn it up because they're done. Like you've ground them into the ground. So if I'm walking into a fight and I'm well conditioned and I can maintain just a little bit more energy than the other person the minute they start to falter they're going to start making mistakes and i'm going to capitalize on that um and then you have to think sorry so just just to go back to your condition like looking at someone being well conditioned what are your markets for with being well conditioned you know what are you looking at when when you sort of get someone in front of you yeah so we'll do a vo2 max assessment initially because what we want to make sure is that you have a good aerobic reserve, right? And so the two things I'm looking at is we might run a modified Cooper's test where we do a 12 minute time trial on a rower and aerodyne or whatever. And then we look at your resting heart rate. My metric says, I want to see that you have very high maximal heart rate. How high can I push that? And then how low is my resting heart rate? Because if you have high maximal heart rate and low resting heart rate, you're going to have a very large VO2 max. And the higher your maximal heart rate is, the benefit of that is that you can control your heart rate more efficiently while you're fighting. As your heart rate goes up, you start losing motor skills. And so if you think about what we're doing when we're grappling, for instance, there's a lot of fine and complex motor skill activation going on, and there's a high level of cognitive thinking going on. The higher my heart rate goes, if I don't have good heart rate tolerance then I start making mistakes if I make mistakes I get caught in something right so like for instance for me my maximal heart rate is around 203 right now okay and I've gotten it up to that point by doing a lot of aerobic training up front to get that really high and to get my resting heart rate down close to 50 that being said as the percentage of heart rate goes up I can maintain a much lower percentage of my maximal heart rate than my opponent, which means he's going to make mistakes and I'm not. He's going to gas out first and I'm not. So we look at that with our fighters, first and foremost, as far as the conditioning. And if you think about strength as being the mother of all qualities for speed and power and for performance, aerobic conditioning is the mother of all qualities when it comes to conditioning side. The bigger and broader aerobic base I have, the higher that VO2 max ceiling, the higher I can get my lactate threshold going, which means I can make more energy a lot faster without getting too much of a pump and dropping too much adrenaline and cramping up and things like that when I'm working on something. So you're obviously we can bring that resting heart rate down with aerobic training and, you know, predominantly aerobic training, but our max heart rate, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly that's going to be generally governed by genetics and our age. Well, that's what we're told, right? And what's the typically in research, what will they use? 220 minus your age, right? Or they'll use like the math. Yeah, they'll use a very ambiguous calculation because it's a lot easier to, if you have 400 people in a study, it a lot easier to do 220 minus your age than it is to run 400 stress tests and actually find out where people VO2 maxes are But this is stuff that easy If you have a heart rate strap and you got a smartphone this is really easy You just go as hard as you can for as long as you can, and you see how high your heart rate can get. This is all stuff that's trainable. When I first started getting into the conditioning aspect and realizing that I needed to get that up high fast, 220 minus my age was pretty much spot on but at the time I was only lifting and it was either I was like a sedentary lifter right I was sitting at a desk all day and lifting weights four or five times a week and resting heart rate was about 188 by the end of training training for a 10k run it was sitting at 203 and then I've actually got the ability to measure serum lactate and I can hold a very high heart rate while not really producing shit tons of lactate so i you that's going to show me that i'm managing intracellular um the intracellular components of atp breakdown and energy production so does that mean that you've actually managed through aerobic training you've actually managed to kind of raise your anaerobic threshold a bit because yeah so if i We're told is primarily governed by genetics and there isn't much legwork or much return in trying to increase that. Well, yeah, but we're not a slave to our genetics, are we? Now, there are going to be some people that are on the extremes, right? So if we look at a traditional bell curve, you know, most people are going to sit in the middle of the bell curve somewhere in that like 70%. Then you're going to have freaks like Kenyan runners who win all the marathon races, right? um that there if you look at that and and some of the other guys who are really good at endurance training they tend to have naturally a higher vo2 max they tend to have mechanisms in their bodies that allows them to have a higher vo2 max but that doesn't mean that you're you can't improve that because you can improve that massively um you can improve that massively and you can massively improve your tolerance for hydrogen ions by raising that lactate ceiling but the problem is You can't really raise that lactate threshold very high if you don't raise the VO2 max ceiling as well, because you're always going to be capped out at the VO2 max ceiling. So if you're getting guys coming in, we tend to use a concept to test and then use the calculator on the website. And what I find is most of the jujitsu and MMA guys are actually pretty good. their vo2 max are coming in pretty high but it's always i guess you know improve that improve their aerobic output you know in terms of on the mats you know making them fitter you know rather than just saying okay it's high let's just not concentrate on that yeah i think it's it's going to be a component of how experienced they are um depends on a sedentary person walks in and starts training jujitsu they're typically if they if they don't do the typical white belt stuff if they come in and they listen to the experienced guys where they're saying, conserve your energy, don't freak out, those guys are going to make a tremendous amount of hydrogen very quickly because they have a massive jump, they have a massive dump in adrenaline because, you know, there's, there's nothing that's going to make you more stressed out than somebody sitting on your face and pinning your arms down, right? So, but once you learn how to control that fear of being strangled and that fear of being suffocated and that fear of being held down, you start learning to manage your energy from an output perspective. But then you can also train the mitochondria and you can train the cardiovascular respiratory system to bring that VO2 max back up. So I think it's really a lot of it's going to be dictated by, you know, where you are in that journey. Are you a beginner? Are you kind of in the middle? Are you at the end of it? One thing that I noticed with a lot of the guys because you you know how it is guys guys come in and they train for six months and are doing really well and then life happens and they don't train for like three months so they get in pretty decent shape in six months and when they come back three months later it's like they never fucking trained before they come back and they're completely out of shape again what i found that is if you do the cross training and you you work on your heart and you work on your vascular system and you work on your mitochondria it's a lot easier to get in shape really quickly when you come back to it and it has much less chance of it dropping off definitely and that's you know you touched on kind of the mental aspect of conditioning and that's definitely something i want to touch on at some point about that when i did the the joel jameson um certification they spoke about that you know the different components of conditioning and the mental side of it was super interesting how we can literally use use up physical energy that we can use on physical performance, just kind of worrying and not going into a combat situation in the right mindsets. Definitely something super interesting. Absolutely because look all of these things are going to be dictated by the steric effectors So the more stressed I am going into a match or going into a role the more likely I'm going to gas out really fast because I'm going to have a huge adrenaline, a huge adrenaline, what am I looking for? Dump, which is then going to make me shaky. I'm going to, I'm going to screw up my bioenergetics. I'm not going to be able to compete very long. I found that out. And the thing is, I know all this stuff, right? And then, but nothing prepares you for your very first match at a competition. And I remember I was fighting a guy. It was my first fight ever at a tournament. It was his first fight ever. I walked up. He's probably, we're about the same age. He was a bit more weathered than me. You could tell that he didn't take care of himself. And I just saw the fear in his eyes when I walked up because I walked up, I was shredded and jacked. And he's looking at me like, oh, my God, I got to fight this guy. And I'm looking at him thinking, fuck, it doesn't really matter how jacked and shredded you are. This guy's technique's better than mine. He's going to choke me out in 30 seconds. And the minute I got him on the ground, I could tell, like, oh, this is not going to go well for him. He is not ready and not conditioned for this. So kind of the start of the fight, everything was going well for me until about three and a half minutes in when I realized I'm holding him too hard and I'm working too hard. and I remember I had his back and I had my hooks in and I'm I'm reaching across trying to grab his lapel and I just realized I can't I can't flex or extend my arm and my hands don't work anymore yeah and I got real shaky and I and I'm like I don't understand like my brain is telling my arm to go across his neck and I can't actually get my arm to go there and my elbows started to seize up Then my adductor started to seize up, and I went, okay, this is what my coach was talking about when he says, I need to relax. Because that mental side, your brain's going to control everything in the peripheral system, and if your brain feels like it's in a threatened state, especially in combat, it's going to overreact, and it's going to then push out too much adrenaline and things, which is going to exhaust you much faster and make you cramp a lot faster. okay so much stuff that you kind of mentioned and there are a few things that i want to go back to and dig into um you mentioned about you sort of briefly just mentioned about the impacts of you know about um aerobic training on our mitochondria and this is something that we're hearing a lot more about lately is you know mitochondria being you know powerful for the cell and being so important for for health and fitness do you want to just touch on that a little bit because i know that was something that we spoke about a lot in the course and the impact of a good training regime one on mitochondria and how that can benefit our health yeah so i mean this is where you're making the majority energy right through the mitochondria so if i have someone who is chronically stressed out over time if their metabolic flexibility is very low we get to a point where the mitochondria is not working as effectively as it should we're not oxidizing things as effectively as as we should once you stop oxidizing things effectively and if you think about that word oxidizing what element on the periodic table do you need to oxidize things you need oxygen so that that in and of itself should be a case of hey maybe i do want to do some aerobics because that's the one thing that gets more oxygen into my body and allows me to oxidize better the better my mitochondria work and the more mitochondria i have up to a point the more energy i can make faster and the more endurance i have as well as the more food i can eat because i can churn through that much better and then when you think about the majority of your fighters that you that you're in contact with how do they eat yeah it's yeah it varies but some of them not great some of them but often they're you know probably in a calorie deficit more often than not I think oh and they're in a massive calorie deficit I know guys I know guys that compete at the at the top levels that they're lucky to eat 1200 to 1800 calories a day. And it just blows my mind because I remember getting ready for my first tournament, I was eating five to 6000 calories a day because I was dropping weight too quickly. And so then I look at my competition coach and I'm going, how are you surviving on 1800 calories a day? And then I realized because I trained, I was training him at the time as well. Well, no wonder you're getting gassed out. No wonder you have all these injuries that won't heal, you're not feeding yourself enough, enough to make the stuff heal. So the first thing is if we work on that mitochondria, sorry, the dog just walked in. Right. If we're working on the mitochondria initially, we're going to have a lot more energy to perform and keep that performance higher over time because that really the that really the First you have to perform but then you have to keep that performance high over five minutes Or what if you in a super fight and it a 20 submission fight What happens if it gets past 10 minutes and you don't have the ability to manage the next 10 minutes? You're pretty screwed. So what we like to do is work on that aerobic base first, get the mitochondria functioning much better initially. then we can then to me you now deserve to do the higher level stuff now if you want to do hit training and you want to do all that that's great you can do all that but you can't a lot of people will start with the intense stuff before they've laid the foundation of the easy stuff first right so it's not and it sounds uh it sounds counterintuitive to take a step back and able to go forward. But, you know, there's also the saying in judo, slow and smooth, smooth is fast. Sometimes you have to slow things down, right, before you can make them fast. And the same thing with weight training as well. Why do we teach people to go with slow tempo weight training initially? It's to get very good at the exercise before you speed the exercise up. And so the same thing goes with the conditioning too. I need to lay down the machinery that's going to allow me to have the endurance and the recovery capacity to uh to perform at a high level which means that in a lot of cases i want to make sure that that anaerobic and aerobic side of my metabolism is balanced out okay so um you'll see a lot of the fighters are very anaerobically conditioned they're just not very aerobically conditioned right so we're we always i mean we've been told by men's health and and whoever else maybe cross I don't know for a long time that like kind of HIIT training will be enough and that will get us our aerobic gains or you can get better aerobic kind of gains from HIIT training than steady state and but I think now we're starting to kind of dispel that myth is that right or maybe I've got that wrong no I mean it will one thing is we have to define what we're talking about with HIIT training right so again we've we split this into two different categories you have you have researchers that will look at at high intensity interval training as a as a factor of how high you can keep your heart rate for a certain amount of time. But then you'll have another side of the researchers that dictate hit as power output. And I tend to look at it as more power output. How high can I have my power output? How long can I maintain that power? For me, that's going to be more important when we're talking about sports is that I can maintain power and repeat that power over and over and over across however many minutes I have to compete at. So things like pick intervals and things like that. what's that? So things like a lactic intervals, lactic power intervals, things like this. Yeah. And like even things like, like a lactic intervals to me, if, if it's a lactate with complete rest, I don't see a lot of usability for that in combat sports. Um, there's no, there's nothing you're really going to do. That's going to last 10 seconds that you need to recover from, right? You're probably, you're probably looking more towards building an aerobic base and then building enough glycolytic base so that you can maintain a high level of power and endurance by using both fat and carbohydrate equally at the same time. Okay. So, but just to go back to the question, you're saying that we need to lay that foundation with like lists, essentially, low intensity, you know, steady state cardio. Could it be done with interval training or is it really that we need to focus on that low intensity stuff? actually yeah that was one of the questions you had like what's the usability of lists i mean there's a reason why over the last however many hundred years that we've been having combat sports that people do road work like why do boxers do road work why do if you go to thailand and you go and you do muay thai you're going to be running a lot okay and there's a good reason for that they understand the value of that now i do think that that can be taken to an extreme like we're not trying to create marathon runners, but being able to go out and do a 5k and maybe a couple of 5k intervals and perform that really at a high level is probably going to be beneficial for you. But again, whenever we talk about cardio, there's two things people think about. They either think about weight loss or they think about running a marathon. They think about like the two most extreme things you can think of. I'm thinking about adaptation, right? I'm thinking about recovery, I'm thinking about better sleep, I'm thinking about the ability to eat more food, the ability to maintain power output for a long time, that's the stuff I'm thinking about. And it doesn't take a long time to build that aerobic base, depending on where you start, right? If you start in your VO2 max, if you put somebody in a concept two and they're at a 24, yeah, it's going to take them a while to get that up. But for most people, I see massive improvements in just six to eight weeks of dead weight.

complicated VO2 max training, if you just get that out of the way, the drop off from that is very, very low. You just get that out of the way and then kind of put that on maintenance. And you can maintain a lot of that, you know, just doing easy flow rolls and things like that. If you go in, you know, go in on a, you know, open mat and just find somebody who wants to do easy flow rolling for 20 or 30 minutes, very easy to maintain that cardiovascular adaptation. And then you can focus on other things like if you want to throw in you know more hit type training that's good too now the secondary thing with this is when we look at hit training we have to we have to dictate what we're looking for you're looking for global cardiovascular respiratory adaptations or you're looking at localized um localized conditioning right so global conditioning is vo2 max localized is do I have enough enzymes and do I have the machinery in my peripheral system to then take you know take advantage of that extra oxygen like doing things like rowing and running and the airdyne and the skier and that type of thing will build a lot of good global conditioning if I'm going to turn that into localized conditioning which I should when I move it into a more specific phase now since you've done Joel Jameson's things this is where we're looking at things like HRIs and HICTs and things like that to then build the machinery localized in my limbs to then be able to take advantage of that and be able to oxidize better now that I can get that oxygen in. So if you think about the first thing is you have to get the oxygen into the body, then you have to get the machinery in the peripheral system to be able to utilize that oxygen as well. So if I can't get the oxygen in, it doesn't matter how good I am locally, I still have to support that with my lungs and with my heart, with my vascular system. So it makes sense. Go ahead and take care of that first, then get really specific on, you know, heavy sled pushes and pulls and strong man type work. And then working more on that really high intensity interval training side of it. Now that I can take advantage of EPOC because I can get oxygen in now. Yeah. I suppose if again, taking that to the next level, if you can do that with specific movements that SPP stuff in like your drilling or you know specific MMA or jiu-jitsu related movements going to be kind of even more you know efficient and you know preparing you for the task at hand yeah I mean if you go like like just imagine you know if you go to a if you don't go to a fight specific class where you're getting ready for a tournament you're going to do things like shark tank like you're going to be in there you're going to you're going to be going hard balls to the wall. If you have a good level of aerobic foundation, it's not going to be as hard for you as if you didn't, right? So it's only going to be a benefit, right? And you see that, right? You go to a competition class, and you can see the guys who it's their first class, and they don't know what to expect. And then they quickly realize this isn't a normal class. And you're basically rolling hard, like you're basically fighting for your life for 60 to 90 minutes and they find out really quickly after 10-15 minutes of this oh shit I need to get in shape it's the stress tester I know my heart rate always goes up is if the coach says well it's shark tanks today you're like fuck I wish I had that pizza for lunch okay you touched on like your your um jiu-jitsu coaching kind of the example you gave around probably globally amongst uh MMA fighters but actually let's even look out at the weight loss population and how people tend to just survive in a calorie deficit so if we switch our focus to a weight loss scenario it can be a fight or it could just be someone trying to lose weight we like in my practice i often see people coming in and it seems as if when we look at their diet that they've been existing for a long time in a calorie deficit you know probably underneath there even without calculating their calorie need you can see that they're probably in a calorie deficit and when you do calculate it certainly backs that up but they're potentially not losing weight and potentially you know just they say that they're fine but objectively you could look at it and think they're probably not fine can you just think some of that about why you know being in a calorie deficit long periods of time maybe isn't the best thing for people yeah so i thought about that a lot that question that you had sent me and there's a few different scenarios that you see You have people that, you know, you have one, like, we'll go through a few different clients. Client A, client A has no idea about food and calories. They think they do because maybe they watch something on Oprah or whatever. I don't know. But they don't realize how many calories are actually in the food they're eating. And they don realize they eating twice the amount of calories than they supposed to be eating You get that client too That client too that client that client very easy to manage you teach them about food you get them tracking for a small amount of time so that they can eyeball their food and then they realize shit i'm actually eating 400 calories more than i thought or in some cases double what they thought they were you know eating then you have on the extreme other side of that you have uh you have people that are have been in a very severe deficit for a long time we see this a lot in the physique industry where, yeah, I know girls that eat seven to 900 calories a day, and they train like 24 hours a week, right? It's like, how are you even surviving on that? And that's all they're doing. They're surviving. They're not actually, you know, they're losing their periods, their hair's falling out, their fingernails are getting brittle and breaking off, like they're barely getting through the day. You know, they've got all these issues going on. And so in that case, a lot of those people need to understand like being in a long-term calorie deficit like that is eventually going to lead to something called reds which is relative energy deficiency syndrome where if i don't have enough calories to support everything my body needs biologically it's going to get rid of the things that um that it doesn't actually need to survive like what do you need to survive my brain my heart my kidneys my liver like all those vital organs still need to be able to operate your ovaries don't need to operate well your balls don't need to operate well right like yeah so like it i i'd like to talk about it like um like a car right if you're driving your car and you're you're running out of gas and you're five kilometers away from the nearest petrol station what's the fit and it's hot outside it's 40 degrees celsius outside what's the first thing you're going to turn off to try to save gas you don't have to push your car maybe the air con you can turn off the air con you're going to roll the windows down and suffer you're probably going to turn the radio off too like you're going to turn off anything that you don't need because you don't want to have to push that car the rest of the way so that's kind of what your body does as well if it's running low on energy it's just going to turn off the air conditioner it's going to turn off the radio it's going to turn off anything it doesn't need so it can actually make it to the next meal so you can get into situations where people have been chronically dieting for a long time or and or they're not eating enough for the activity that they're doing and so they get this metabolic maladaptation where things start to slow down or their body just eliminates things for a small period of time kind of puts them in hibernation until you actually make that deficit back up and you see it a lot like people people when they when january comes around what's everybody do i'm going to go to the gym this is my year 20 years in a row 20th time this is my year to get in shape and lose all this flap they jump into the gym and they start thrashing themselves and they go on like a 1200 to 1500 calorie diet and they don't realize that that calories in calories out model their calories out is so high that they really when you do the math they don't have enough energy coming in to support basic life systems so their body starts shutting things down in order to just get buy, right? So in a lot of cases, those chronic dieters need to massively increase their calories, at least close to maintenance. So typically what we'll do is when we have somebody that's been chronically dieting like that, we'll take them to almost maintenance less, maybe 10% calories. And that's usually a lot more, 800, 900, sometimes 1200 calories more than they've been eating. Now, all of a sudden, thermogenesis gets upregulated. They're not freezing cold all the time, all of a sudden they get the period back, they can get a solid boner and now they want to have sex. So that's great. They're sleeping better. Their guts aren't dysfunctional, but it's a really hard sell to someone who's been chronically dieting that, listen, you're going to have to eat more for a small amount of time. And you're probably going to have to gain a little weight initially before we can start dieting again. Right. Um, I, I don't have a problem with long-term dieting or long continuous dieting as long as the deficit is only small enough to chip away at body fat right but that's not what people do people will they'll they'll write a diet and they'll be eating you know 60 of what they need to be eating um and then they do that for months and months and months and months whereas they might they might only need to just pull 15 of their calories out and they could do that for a long period of time if they're going to pull a lot of calories out, then it's probably going to be beneficial to throw in some refeeds, right? And so one of the tools we'll use for that is basically a thermometer. We'll have them track their afternoon temperature And if that really low then we overfeed them until we get the temperature higher and then we start a deficit um if they if they cruising along we see a trend in their body temperature going down it's time for a refeed or it's time for a diet break what are you so what would you say is a significant drop in body temperature so typically what we see is we see girls in the high 34s low 35s and that's when and then then you know it's the typical symptoms like i'm cold all the time cold hands and feet they usually have super low blood pressure they have no energy to do anything they're just surviving on sheer willpower that's something we see what we like to do is let's try to get you around you know 36 4 to 36 8 and then then we'll start chipping some calories away but if we see that that that temperature starts to tank we're going to need to do a diet break or a refeed well yeah yeah i like that i've not heard of that actually using like those metrics to kind of indicate when we do a refeed i know a lot of people might do every three or four weeks or eight weeks or something like that just you know in a refeed because they know that they've been in a kind of deficit for a while but having a metric there to kind of indicate when your body is actually starting to lose some of that functions it's great you know because we've got the data data is so important isn't it it makes more sense to do it that way right so it makes more sense to not use ambiguous time periods because everybody's totally different, right? When I was teaching at Pollock and Group, our thing was deload your workout every third workout if you're doing heavy strength work. But not everybody needs that, right? If I can use a metric like resting heart rate and HRV, if I have somebody in their third week and resting heart rate is starting to go up and their HRV is starting to tank, I already know they're overreaching. It's time for a deload at that point or it's time to switch emphasis on what they're training same thing with the thermometer the only problem is there's not a lot of data like if you talk to people who are evidence-based they're going to go oh well you know there's not a lot of literature out there with the thermometer stuff but like we use it with a lot of success um you know that's something that uh and you've probably heard you know i don't know when you did foundations but it's kind of what when we started doing our level two foundation we started talking about thyroid and thermogenesis stuff that was kind of a point to watch people's temperature if it starts to drop and they're feeling cold then they probably don't have enough energy intake to ramp up thermogenesis we probably want to take care of that because that's going to be super important and that's a good indicator that you've pushed it too far yeah super super interesting i think that is a that's a bit of a game changer for a lot of people who are probably trying to lose weight and maybe struggling to lose weight they've been in a calorie deficit for a long time things have kind of slowed down and it's like where do you go from that you cut yourself your calories down from 2,000 to 1,500 to maybe a thousand and you're saying what I can't cut it down anymore and you see people you know with the best of intentions giving this advice that your weight loss is stalled you know it's time to pull your calories down because calorie deficit is the most important thing and it's like well how far do you know what point yeah stop doing that I mean do you just do you just keep pulling it down to you're at zero calories and you're like doing a 40 day Jesus fast. I don't know. Or do you eat, you know, celery. So it's like negative calories or whatever people say, right? It's just, at some point you got to look at it and say, you got to look at it and say, I feel horrible. I'm not losing weight. Something's not working. Maybe I try doing the opposite of what I'm doing. Maybe I go back to maintenance for a period of time. See if things, see if I feel better. Maybe I cut the training down a little bit or try a different type of training and see if things, see if things work out. The only problem is that for a lot of people, that initial weight gain kind of screws with them. And, you know, when people are desperate, the thinking portion of their brain kind of turns off and they start thinking very limbically and very emotionally. So if I have someone who's been dieting and, you know, they're not seeing a lot of success, if I tell, if I say, hey, Karen, look, we're going to pump your calories up like 800, you are going to gain a small amount of weight. This is not fat. It's most likely just water, glycogen and fecal matter. That's all it is like that. You take a good solid poo. It'll come right off. You get in a really hot bath and sweat it off like an MMA athlete. It'll come right back off. But the minute they get on the scale, one of the issues is they're identifying their identity surrounds that scale. Right? So the minute they get on the scale and it goes up, their feeling of self-worth goes down and they see that as a negative and then they starve themselves the next day okay so in a lot of cases it takes a lot of time coaching and saying look you gaining this weight is okay that does not define you and if you want to get better you're going to have to gain a little weight initially and what crazy is the most I typically see people gain I don think I ever had a girl gain more than about three kilos in weight with refeeding even doubling their calories Because once you start adding those calories back all those systems that have been dormant now turn on Their body heat goes up. They burn more calories when they train. They're sleeping better. Like the body has a really good, it's very efficient at moving itself up and down depending on what you're doing to it. So it's very good at keeping you alive when you're doing dumb shit to it. It's just the psychological aspect of convincing them that it has to get a little bit worse before it gets better because you're at 900 calories. I'm not willing to take you to 600 calories, and I'm not willing to add five more training sessions because that's not going to provide a long-term solution. and it's it's the whole experience is just it's just really having an impact on the nervous system as well i imagine you know that more more training less and less food and this is one of the things that really you know would strike a chord with me when i did the foundations course was how or the impact of the nervous system and you know being in that kind of stress response for long periods of time the impact again that that is having on our on our health on a broad spectrum of different areas of our health um is so powerful and there are things that we just wouldn't expect there are certain aspects that you know that increased cortisol that we just wouldn't expect and i don't know if you want to dig into some of that stuff so i know it's a big thing that we're looking at nowadays in the industry yeah the thing is i i hate i hate saying cortisol because if you say that, then it kind of demonizes cortisol. And cortisol, what it's doing is it's actually protecting you. It's actually keeping you alive because of what you're doing to yourself. So in a lot of cases, probably the main thing that's really screwing people up, if we want to blame something, it's probably going to be adrenaline. Okay, because adrenaline, if you think about listening to that, listening to that talk that I had with Alex Fajita and with Mike T. Nelson. Mike T. Nelson said something very, very important. Insulin is kind of like a master switch for your metabolism, okay? Well, the real opponent of insulin is adrenaline, okay? So if we think about what they do, insulin tells things to basically be anabolic. It tells you to take little things and build big things out of them. So like taking sugar and turning it into stored glycogen, right? Taking fat out of the bloodstream and putting it in adipocytes where it's in a much safer area in a fat cell than it is in your bloodstream, right? So at this point, insulin's doing a very good job of protecting you. If you get more and more stressed out and you have an adrenaline load, adrenaline does the opposite. It tells things to break down because if your brain thinks that you're being threatened, you're wanting a lot of energy to be pushed out into the bloodstream and also to be broken down into the cell. So you get at this point when people are very stressed out that they're breaking things down faster than they can build them back up. Okay. So if I'm breaking down glycogen really quickly to make glucose and I'm shoving tons of glucose into the cell, it's going to overwhelm the mitochondria. If the mitochondria gets overwhelmed, it's going to shut down the enzymes that's going to allow things to go into the mitochondria. Then it's going to shut the cell down. So you become insulin resistant and you can become insulin resistant. And then later you can become fatty acid resistant. Now you take somebody to do bloods and they have high triglycerides, high cholesterol or high LDL, low HDL, high levels of inflammation, high blood sugar. This is all basically a cell danger response where you probably have too much energy trying to be pushed into the cell because you're too stressed out. So, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately when I look into the biochemistry of it, is it really a caloric toxicity that's causing the issues or is it something deeper? And one of those main regulators is going to be something called acetyl-CoA that's in your mitochondria. When it gets to a level of high, it's going to shut the mitochondria down until I don't, it's going to say I'm overwhelmed. I don't need any more of these substrates. So that's what's going to shut the cell down to stop accepting things. Well, if it shuts that down, then things like glucose and fatty acids are going to get higher in the bloodstream, which can create a level of glucotoxicity and lipotoxicity. Well, where's a really good garbage dump for those things? Fat cells. So we use fat cells as kind of a garbage disposal for excessive things like environmental toxins or like fuel substrates that can't be used initially. And I suppose the outcome of that is things like heading towards type 2 diabetes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

This goes back, if we circle around, of why it's so important to get a good level of aerobic fitness and get your VO2 max up. It's especially helpful for people who are getting into that metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes type of, if they're moving down the continuum towards that. If I can get someone to do the work and make more mitochondria, it's like they say, many hands make light work. If I have more mitochondria, then I can disperse that excessive amount of fuel to more workers, and I can create more energy out of that. So people, I mean, just looking at that little, because we will see that a fair bit, people coming in who are kind of flirting with type 2 diabetes, kind of on that kind of line of not quite there, but the blood sugar readings are coming in higher than they should be, pre and post-prandial, maybe waking. um you're saying potentially that like if we can like sorry generally the advice that we're getting from the nhs is go and lose weight you know go and lose weight as being the primary kind of um you know thing that's going to have a positive impact and bring the blood sugars down if you lose weight get into a calorie deficit that that's going to be enough um and certainly sometimes we're seeing that other times not necessarily seeing that being enough and And so you're saying potentially this idea of building like an aerobic base is going to be very impactful. That's going to impact massively. Like the NHS isn't wrong. Like one of the best things you can do for your health if you are overweight is to lose body fat. Like that's one of the best things you can do, right? But what are you going to tell the really skinny diabetic about that? When you have a guy who's skinny and he's type 2 diabetic, what the fuck is he going to lose? He doesn't have any weight to lose. he's got to build muscle and he's got to build mitochondria, right? So what you typically see is you see everything is going to bottleneck out at certain levels of the biochemistry. And everything happens in about the same way, but it can happen for different reasons. I can be eating a lot of exogenous food that can be gumming those things up, or I can be in a massive calorie deficit my body tanks down my metabolism so now that alters calories in calories out just the same as not doing anything in an overeating world um so it's two different scenarios but realistically a lot of the same thing happening at the cellular level and then and then if we couple um kind of extra stresses on top of that shifting people more into that sympathetic nervous system we might be getting that impact of adrenaline on the whole process as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. The lower your HRV is, the more prone you're going to be for having high amounts of adrenaline. The more prone you are to be reactive to things, the more prone you are to anxiety and stress, which is then going to become like a never ending cycle of self-induced stress. You know, you've got to, that's kind of one of the things, you've got to break out of that. And to break out of that, sometimes we have to do the things that we don't like to do especially for for men like to tell it to tell a guy he needs to do a little bit more aerobic conditioning and journal and meditate maybe see a counselor he's going to be like nah fuck off i'm just going to go lift more weights and run hill intervals and shit like that and that will work for for a period of time but it doesn't always work it's not always a long-lasting solution and it's the same thing on the on the side of the women whenever you whenever a woman comes in they're typically typically and i'm being i'm saying all this in a very generalized manner most guys that come in are going to be hyper tense and most girls are going to be hypotense and a lot of it has to do with what they've done before they've come to see you whenever most men want to change the way their physique looks what modality do they usually choose piling food in and lifting weights that's it right exactly right so here's a thing. I'm piling food. Hypertrophy work and overeating is inherently insulin resistance promoting and it's inherently inflammatory promoting. And that's not a bad thing if it's balanced out. But most guys will go on a nine month bulk to try to put weight on and they don't realize it's maybe it's wintertime and you're wearing a lot of heavy clothing and you're not really looking at yourself naked and you look really good in clothes. And then you get your spring hits and you're going to start your summer shred and you kind of take a an assessment of yourself in the in the mirror and you go oh my god i took that bulk a little too far so then what do they end up doing they then they super diet and they go the extreme the opposite direction so most of the guys that that we see they probably need to do more conditioning initially and a little bit less weight training not no weight training but a little bit less emphasis on that and a little bit more emphasis on the conditioning side Most women probably need to do a little less conditioning and a little bit more actual weight training Because you get a girl that comes in and, again, for anybody listening to this, I know I'm being very – I'm not trying to be misogynistic. I'm just speaking from experience. Most girls will come in and you'll say, okay, look, you're borderline very hypotense. um you tell me whenever you stand up you're getting postural hypo hypotension you're you're seeing spots and you're getting really uh you're starting to feel faint you have cold hands and feet what we're going to work on is we're probably going to work on a lot of strength training initially and not as much conditioning and then it's almost always they go oh i do strength training and you go oh cool what do you do they go oh i do body pump you're like no no no no that's no no no that's not what i mean is like uncomfortable lifting where you actually strained and you feel like you're going to poop out your spleen. Like that's, that's what I'm talking about. Because that's, what's going to raise your blood pressure back up. And for the guy and for the guys, it's like, Hey man, your blood pressure is really high. You got stage two hypertension. I need to get that down. You're not going to be able to lift that away. We're probably going to have to do some just standard aerobic interval training or Tabata's or whatever you've been steady state, cardio lifts, whatever you might need to do that for a little bit of time. And then the guy looks at you and goes, Oh no, I'm going to lose all my gains. I'm like, well, you know, if you have a heart attack, you're going to lose your gains anyways. If you get diabetic, you're going to lose them anyways. So you might as well spend a good six to eight weeks getting in shape. And then we can reassess and start working on your strength and hypertrophy at that point. Yeah, super interesting. And that's exactly it. That is a lot of the time what you see, isn't it? It's one needing to go one way and then maybe needing to be pulled back a little bit. um we i want to touch on the nervous system but i've got some questions from people that kind of submitted some questions and i think we'll kind of touch on some of the things within those questions that that the nervous system's having an impact on that we might not actually understand you know or we might not realize that our kind of unmanaged nervous system is having an impact on um this is one that i well i'll ask you the question and then you can kind of make it or let us know about it but um someone's uh messaged in and kind of said that they have been told that they've got a gluten intolerance so a food intolerance um they've done their own research and there's a bit of a split you know some people are saying gluten is this kind of toxic substance different farming techniques nowadays causing this you know um intolerance or widespread intolerance to gluten other people so not necessarily celiac but just intolerance other people are saying this doesn't exist like you know this is this is bullshit um yeah but the person is saying that they've had a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of their diet that they don't but they're not sure they kind of think well maybe gluten isn't the problem but i am seeing a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of my diet do you have any thoughts about what might be causing that reaction to gluten and why that might be occurring well okay so you can get you can get intolerant to pretty much almost anything food wise right whether that's intolerance to dairy or whether it's intolerance to a certain vegetable or whatever so when you're under an extreme amount of chronic stress or stress for a long time we realize that the master controller for this is your hypothalamus. So if you think this hypothalamus, a little gland in your brain, and it's, it's kind of like looking around at the rest of everybody else and it's saying, okay, I, I, here, I go back, I'll teach it the way I usually do. Cause I think about it as a business. Think about the hypothalamus as like the CEO of a company, right? So what does the CEO do? He looks at financial reports and predictions and he looks at history and he looks at all this stuff and he makes decisions on what everybody else needs to be doing. So then if he's looking around and he's seeing that, you know, you're stressed out and you have all these issues going on, he's going to then talk to other glands in the body. One of the main ones is the pituitary gland. And that you think about him, he's kind of like the general manager of the company. So he's getting advice from the CEO. He's then going to go tell all the other departments what they need to do. Okay. So then the, the pituitary will talk to the adrenals and the thyroid and the testes and all these other areas and they'll tell the workers what to do and the workers are your little hormones and that type of thing so depending on what's been going on things like trauma early childhood trauma adult trauma chronic stress not sleeping enough chronically dieting yo-yo dieting overeating all these things are stressors trainings are stress like everything's a stressor your brain is going to mount a response to that through a chemical signal through adrenal output of things things like cortisol And it gonna also have a nervous system component as well here the thing if i bathing in stress for a long time the nervous system can then accelerate intestinal permeability by increasing activation of mast cells and histamine which basically for lack of a better way of saying it punches holes in your intestines and allows for things to get into circulation that aren't supposed to be there high levels of cortisol leaky gut is that leaky gut syndrome what people have preferred yeah and you know depending on who you talk to if you say leaky gut syndrome they'll lose their minds you know to me it's all a matter of semantics leaky gut intestinal permeability whatever that basically your things are getting in the circulation aren't supposed to be there stress increases something called zonulin which then also creates leak years leak your cells and that type of thing so you start getting antigens or food particles that aren't digested totally in the body you start bacteria viruses all sorts of stuff that can get into circulation and then you mount it you mount an immune system response which increases inflammation and then the immune system starts to attack those foods so if it's somebody that maybe they've lived off of gluten for a long period of time and they've gone through some traumatic things and not sleeping a lot or maybe they were building their career and they basically ate a croissant for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and a lasagna bake for dinner, and they've been over consuming gluten for a long time while they're under stress, there's a good chance that they could have an immune, immune modulated inflammatory response towards that food. So then every time they get it, they get a reaction. So yeah, that there can be that, you know, there's a lot of things about gluten that nobody knows about yet. There's a, we don't know that much about the body. Anyways, people try to talk like we know what the hell the body's doing. Nobody knows shit, right? It's, modern medicine has not been around that long and we're still finding things out all the time and testing and retesting. But if you get locked into that type of brain trauma, stress, chronic stress, whatever, and then you start getting an immune system response, if you pull gluten out, you're probably going to feel a bit better. If you put it back in, you're probably going to feel a bit worse. So in that case, if you feel better without the gluten, then just avoid gluten for a while, say like six to eight weeks, try to avoid it as much as you can, and then try eating it again. And if you don't get a response to it, then genetically, you probably don't have a problem. If you've been tested, if you're not celiac, if you don't have an IBD, IBS, whatever, gluten is probably not going to be a problem. But people need to understand that anytime you overeat anything, while you're under an enormous amount of stress, you are probably going to get intolerant to that, which is why people should probably try a lot of stress management and be good food variety okay so and so cutting so if someone does get to that point potentially pulling that out of the diet and starting to address some of those kind of chronic stresses and then maybe thinking about reintroducing it at a later date when stress is more manageable or building those tools to manage stress and potentially there could be some some reintroduction without the symptoms yeah absolutely and you know if you do a lot of reading into it nobody knows Is it gluten that's the problem or is it wheat that's the problem? Is corn the problem? There's all these things that can be causing inflammation. If you're overeating them, especially if your body can't recover from that, then that can cause a problem. Hell, training causes intestinal permeability. If you train in the heat, you become temporarily permeable in the intestines, especially if you're training at a high VO2 max like what you would be doing if you're rolling a lot and competing and doing jiu-jitsu or if you're an endurance athlete or you know if it's hot outside if like in Brisbane here it's hot most of the year and if you're training out my shed and it's 38 degrees outside and 80% humidity you are creating a situation where as your core body temperature goes up it does create a level of intestinal permeability and so you have to keep that in mind right so if I if I'm eating gluten breakfast lunch and dinner if I'm eating dairy and I have a dairy issue if I'm also training in the heat, if I'm not getting enough sleep, these are all contributing factors that would then quite possibly create an environment where you could become intolerant to a certain food. The thing to do is do a diet for a while and then try to add it back in. If you get another reaction, then guess what? Gluten's probably not for you. But I personally could not, I wouldn't, I don't have any issues with gluten. My issue is typically with dairy. When I get stressed out, I get dairy issues, but man, if I had to go the rest of my life without dairy or gluten, man, what's life's not worth living shit. Um, but it's just all three groups there, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, no, no pizza, no, you know, Greek yogurt and all this shit. Yeah. Like I feel, I feel sorry for a lot of my friends and a lot of my colleagues that do actually have real issues Like uh like my one of my trainers shane he uh he celiac like he can have it like um and i just looking at that like man i wish there was something i could do to snap my finger and fix that so that he could have foods that he doesn't you know can't does he can't have his partner does not have celiac but every time she adds in gluten it jacks her up my wife zoe every time she eats gluten it jacks her up right so if um even if you're tested and um you're shown that it's not an issue it could still potentially be an issue um and if it's bothering you that bad then just avoid it well we went on holiday to sicily for two weeks and the amount of cannolis and ice cream and pasta and pizza we ate If I couldn't go back there, I don't know what I'd do. It was the best time of the year. Well, you know, you hear a lot, too. You hear a lot. Guys, they'll go to Italy for a holiday, and they'll eat pizza and bread and all this, and they'll go, oh, I didn't have a single issue eating gluten and wheat and all that stuff in Italy. They must just have different wheat than we have here. But then they go to Sainsbury's or they go wherever, and they buy pasta that was in Italy, And they have a reaction to it. Like it probably has less to do with the pasta and the bread and all of that. It probably has more to do with the environment you're putting yourself into, which is I'm stressed out all the time. My tolerance to things are going to go down. If I go on holiday and the stress goes down, all of a sudden my tolerance goes up. Interesting. Yeah, super interesting, isn't it? Just that little example is amazing. Yeah. Stress, your brain controls everything. when I lived in Texas I would I would tell clients to go on holiday you'd have I'd have a business owner that hadn't had a holiday in 10 years and they're not they're getting zero results even though they're being great on everything I'm like listen I want you to take two weeks and I want you to go to Mexico and I want you to sit on the beach and I want you to drink beer and eat burritos I don't give a shit what you do I just I don't want you to diet or train and they would lose weight and they'd come back and they'd be like, okay, I got it. I just need to drink beer and eat Mexican food all day. That's the solution. It's like, no, the solution is to put your body in the environment that you had in Mexico, which is you need to start taking more time for yourself and de-stressing because that's ultimately what's controlling your digestive issues. So just on that, so looking at the gut, let's just go back to the gut health. So I've got another question about gut health here. it's about kind of about poo so I know you'll like this question someone said given on a day-to-day basis their diet dietary intake may change they've eaten different things every day how do they know like sorry given on a day-to-day base their dietary intake may change their poop basically every day because they're doing different things how do they know whether they've managed to kind of maintain optimal gut health if they're really trying to kind of keep their gut nice and healthy what markers are they looking for if that kind of poop is changing day to day? I mean, yeah, if your poop is changing day to day, the best thing to do is keep a food log and just kind of saying, okay, if I wake up and I'm basically spackling my toilet with diarrhea, what did I eat the day before? Because that's probably what's going to be the issue. And, you know, gut health can get pretty, pretty deep and intense. And it's another one of those things. We just, we know a little bit about a very complex system in the body. So what I'll typically tell people to do is if you want to eliminate all doubt, go do a stool analysis test, do a CDSA and see what's going on with your gut, right? Because you could have some type of imbalance that when you eat certain things, bacteria will react in a certain manner. So like I was actually, I normally don't run tests for people. I normally try to fix things before I order an expensive test, right? Because a lot of cases, a lot of the gut stuff, the same treatments help pretty much everything. But I would rather spend money on better lifestyle stuff and maybe some certain specific supplementation protocols, see if that alleviates a lot of it. If it doesn't, then we're on a stool analysis. But one of my clients here in Australia, he's a pharmacist, so he has access to all these tests. And he was doing fantastically well. He went to Croatia, did like a boats and hoes type thing that they do out there I don't know what partying and all that and went to Amsterdam came home and then all of a sudden like he was having all these massive issues with a bloat and gas and like he's got a six-pack but his guts are blown out diarrhea all this we can't figure out what it is and I'm like alright just run a CDSA and his his he has massive fungal overgrowth there's a bunch of bacteria that's really off like opportunistic the bacteria that's really off and so in a situation where it's extreme like that

then the best case thing to do is find somebody that can order you the right tests and then run a, run a protocol. That's going to be very direct. Like for him, because he's the pharmacist, very easy for us to pick a good pharmaceutical antifungal, a good pharmaceutical antibacterial, and then also layer on top of that, a lot of holistic type natural things for maintenance. But if you don't have a good doctor that can, can understand this type of stuff, then your best case scenario is keep a very diligent food log and then see how you react to different foods and see if eliminating those foods helps with the issue. And then taking those metrics, take your stress metrics. Are you sleeping well? Do you feel well rested? Do you have bags under your eyes? Do you have darkening under your eyes? Those are all symptoms. Do you have any type of fungal issues anywhere else? Athlete's foot, vaginal thrush, oral thrush, itchy bum hole, fingernail fungus. Like these are all symptoms that you might have an issue where your gut bacteria has gotten a little bit out of balance. So yeah, so like you say, in the absence of the kind of expensive tests, an elimination diet with a good kind of tracking protocol in terms of physical and or your subjective experiences and how you're appearing and then starting to reintroduce things would be a great way of kind of zeroing in on potential issues yeah for me that's kind of the first line therapy right let's see let's see if it's the food or if it's the environment so if i say so like the easiest thing to do is just take a piece of paper out and draw a line down the middle of it put a yes on one side and a no on the other now on the no side you write down all the common things that you eat every week you're not going to eat those for like three or four weeks okay so let's say like most people eggs chicken beef that'll be like their top three proteins that they eat then for a lot of people it might be green beans or you know you you write down peas You write down all the stuff you normally eat. We're not going to eat that stuff for like a month, maybe a month and a half, and let's try something different. Like instead of chicken, let's have turkey. Instead of beef, let's have bison. Let's eat some more fish and seafood, things like that, and see if that resolves the problem. If that resolves the problem, then we know it was the food creating the problem, and an elimination diet is probably going to be good to do for a good two months and then reintroduce foods one at a time. if they do an elimination diet and it doesn't get significantly better then there's probably some type of pathology in their gut and possibly an issue between their gut and their brain at that point they want they need to be referred out to speak to somebody who can actually do the right testing to see what's going on in the gut do i need an antifungal do i need an antibacterial do i need both which is usually usually the case if you've got a fungal issue you'll usually almost always have a bacterial issue as well. And I think one of the reasons that is, is because if you have long-term chronic stress, that's going to cause an over-activation of your immune system. Cortisol goes up to bring the immune system back down and kind of put it back under control. And once it does that, it tends to suppress your immune system, which then allows your gut to get dysbiotic. But, you know, as far as what you can do for yourself, the elimination diet, maybe looking at But if you wanted to play around with some antimicrobials like black walnut, berberine, if you wanted to look at something like olive oregano, if you want to look at like rosemary oil, like look at some volatile oils, then look at some antimicrobials. That stuff can go, you know, you can try that for a few weeks to also see if that helps. If it doesn't or you feel worse, then it's definitely time to get referred out and go see a doctor. poop in a little bucket they go and they analyze it and then i'll tell you exactly what's in there and then you get very specific on how to treat that okay that's good so another question i had was going back to kind of or another question that got sent to me was a couple of questions around that kind of someone who's flirting with type 2 diabetes so they've been having some high blood sugar readings um and they were looking at ways of managing that um so they were looking at potentially uh the best supplements or minerals or foods to help reduce or bring down blood sugars okay all right so let's start let's start with food because everything should be food based and supplement secondary so let's we'll talk food and training number one do it get get your aerobic work in i'm telling you man that's going to be the best thing number one is that number two is obviously resistance training. The majority of where you hold glycogen, the biggest depot is going to be in type 2X fibers. So you're going to want to lift with, you don want to lift with heavy weights but you do want to lift to technical failure So lifting in like bodybuilder rep ranges So if we looking at like hypertrophy rep ranges strength endurance rep ranges and making sure that you take it down to where you getting it like one ugly rep and you done. Like the minute you get one ugly rep, that's the end. You've pretty much fatigued everything you need to. If I can grow more type 2X fiber and type 2A fiber, I can do glycogen. right so that that will be helpful if i'm also doing some of the higher rep stuff like the hypertrophy and the strength endurance stuff and if i'm doing some aerobic training then that's going to build more mitochondria that allows me to manage that flow of energy through the cell and through the mitochondria so that's going to be helpful the third thing is sleep a lot of people that i see that are having issues especially with metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes they are not prioritizing sleep if you don't sleep your blood sugar rises all right and then it'd be it makes you basically insulin resistant the rest of the day. Making sure you're doing simple lifestyle stuff like walking more, like not worrying about hitting like 20,000 steps a day. But, you know, if you're in London and you're one tube station away and it's a 15 minute walk to that tube station, get off early and walk the 15 minutes and just try to do simple stuff like that. Park further away from things. The easy, easy stuff. and then looking at things like, you know, if you're sitting at home and you're not doing anything and you're watching, you know, Netflix, sit on the floor and do some nice light stretching, just do some static stretching, you know. What we really need to do more of to be able to get more glucose into the cell and get it out of the bloodstream is we need more muscular contraction, okay. So that doesn't necessarily mean lifting weights more. All you need is to contract the muscle. When you contract the muscle, you become glucose sensitive. And that's, that is different than insulin sensitive. So even if I'm, if I'm like, after we get off this, I'm going to go watch the new episodes of the last dance. Um, and what I can do, I've been sitting at a desk all day working. So what I can do on there is I can just flex muscles for 20 or 30 or 40 seconds. And that's enough contraction to make your bot, your cells more glucose sensitive. That's really easy stuff. people can do at a desk when they're at work and no one even knows you're doing it. Stretching is the same thing. If I go into a deep static stretch, the muscles are contracting to protect joints. If I can hold that, that makes me more glucose sensitive. So the more stuff I can do to become glucose sensitive and to burn through energy and to build more mitochondria, the easier it's going to be to regulate my blood sugar. So is that a good thing to do before eating, doing like a body scan of contract and relax or some stretching before a meal absolutely absolutely and that's that's also the case to to train multiple times a day and when i say multiple times a day i'm not meaning like going in and you know maybe working up to one rep max in the morning and then going back in the afternoon and doing functional like perch v and then coming back in the evening and doing like giant sets what i'm saying is like wake up when you wake up in the morning okay wake up have your cup of coffee, have a pee and a poo, and then do like 10 minutes of stretching or do 10 minutes of yoga, do 10 minutes of sun salutation, do 10 minutes of sprawls, just something to get the body moving. Okay, then at lunch, maybe you're contracting all your muscles, you go out for a quick 10, brisk 10 minute walk before you eat that type of thing. When then, you know, in the evening, you go and you hit your training, and then you make sure you, you know, get a good night's sleep. I mean, it's really the, it's the simple stuff that's screwing people up. It's not the, it's not what they're doing dedicated in the gym. It's what they're not doing outside of the gym. And I had this, I had a long talk with, I've got like some herniated lumbar discs right now. And so the physiotherapist I see, he works on the nervous system, then he works on the mechanical side. And so you're going to kind of see a theme going forward in all of the industries. We got to work on the brain and the nervous system, then we can work on the muscles and the mechanics. and so we had this uh a big talk about look you know we can fix you like i can fix you with programming he can fix you with a physio but if you go home and you sit at your desk the same way you've been that's going to negate all the all the hard work you've been doing so it's the little basic everyday things that screw a lot of people up i think maybe having a little bit of knowledge some people would say so if we just say just go for a walk it's going to help your type you know borderline type two it's like well that's not going to help why is that going to help you know a little bit of knowledge around the kind of you know what's happening on a cellular level suddenly it's like oh okay i can see how that actually is going to help let's do that it's like we it's like we talked about earlier like sometimes you got to take a couple of steps back and sometimes you got to slow down before you go faster and so in order to get somebody to buy into that you have to explain you know what the benefit it all a sales process I need you to do this because it going to benefit you in a certain way Now, as far as supplements are concerned, like if you're not taking a multivitamin, multimineral, then you don't need to worry about anything else because that should be the base of everything. You know, something that has a good amount of B vitamins in it and the right forms of B vitamins. like spin if you're gonna buy a vitamin buy a very good vitamin don't buy bullshit vitamin right there's no point because then it becomes an anti-nutrient but you need a lot of b vitamins in your biochemistry you need a lot of magnesium you need a lot of zinc you need copper you need manganese there's a lot of things that you need that you're probably not going to be getting enough of in your food at least not optimal values you might be hitting the rda but hitting an optimal level is going to be a completely different story. And you're always going to be bottlenecked at what cofactors you have to drive those processes. So if I don't have enough of certain B vitamins, certain things aren't going to work as fast as they're supposed to, right? So that would be my first thing. The second thing is to stay away from glucose disposal agents, because a lot of people will take glucose disposal agents because they're what they're doing is they're just trying to lower the number on their glucometer. What they're not understanding is, yes initially that will lower the number on the glucometer if you're waking up and you're at eight millimoles on your glucometer and you take a glucose disposal agent yeah it might drop down to 6.5 in a few weeks the problem that you're not understanding is you're still you're you're shoving glucose into a cell that doesn't want it for some specific reason it it makes more sense to build more mitochondria first then if you need a glucose disposal agent knock yourself out If you're going to take anything, especially with high fasting blood sugar, you're probably going to want to take something like berberine. Because one of the main things that berberine does is it dampens down your liver's ability to manufacture glucose. Because that's really where you're getting the glucose from is high adrenaline is going to crank up gluconeogenesis. Your liver is going to start making a lot of glucose. Now you wake up, you've got really high levels of glucose. there's one point where you need to get that into the cell but there's another point where you need to get the liver to stop making so much of it and that's why doctors will put people on metformin because one of the main actions other than just making you more insulin sensitive it also pushes down the liver's ability to make glucose so then it makes your glucose look a lot better but again that stuff those are band-aids those aren't long-term solutions right we still have to take care of the getting more fit and getting more healthy on the side too so you touched on it but the the same another question from the the same uh chap was um he's been having high waking um blood sugars but pre and post prandial generally now are after starting to input some aerobic conditioning and it's like calorie deficit bringing carbohydrates down and a lot of the things that are being recommended the daytime readings tend to be okay but the morning reading is always pretty much over where it should be yeah so some of the stuff some of the tactics we'll use with that is we might give somebody 500 to a thousand milligrams of berberine before bed okay so we might do that we also might we also might do a sleep assessment and say okay are you waking up a lot are you waking up to pee a lot at night typically they'll say yes okay so just so we have the foundational fundamental stuff down how are your sleeping arrangements do you is it completely dark in your room is it cold enough in your room does your partner sleep with you and they have weird sleeping habits and that's keeping up do you sleep with dogs like that's like like i my my wife and i actually have separate separate bedrooms and the reason we have separate bedrooms and and we'll we'll spend the night with each other a couple of nights a week but the majority the time we don't because she loves to sleep with the dogs then the dogs screw my sleep up and uh and zoe you could drop zoe in the middle of a war zone bombs going off and she could sleep but i can't yeah so i want her to be able to sleep with the dogs because she enjoys that but i also want to get good sleep so i sleep in a separate separate bedroom um so those are things you got to talk about is there is there any light coming in from a street lamp or something like that. Maybe we get you some blackout curtains. Maybe are you in the middle of town? There's a lot of noise. Maybe get a white noise machine or play white noise stuff on your cell phone. You want to make sure that they're taking care of the sleep. Because like I said earlier, if you're not sleeping well and sleeping soundly, your blood sugar is going to be artificially raised. So if we correct the sleeping habits, then we can take some berberine and then we might actually have a meal a couple hours before bed to make sure we have ample amounts of liver glycogen So we might do something like a little bit of honey with a little bit of sodium So that will quickly replenish liver glycogen The sodium will help keep you from having to wake up to pee at night. And then we'll also mix that in with maybe a little bit of Greek yogurt because there's been some pretty good studies showing that casein protein before bed creates an environment for you to be anti-catabolic while you sleep. so that makes a really nice yummy treat for people if they have like a bowl like a cup of berries with some greek yogurt maybe drizzle some honey on top and throw a little bit of sea salt on that mix it up and have that at the end of the day before you go to bed oh yeah yeah i've heard that before actually but not in that context of of managing kind of you know high blood sugars in the morning but i like that and then there's some man there's some other things too like um you know there could be issues with serotonin and melatonin when people are very stressed out and anxious when you're very stressed out and your body's breaking energy down rapidly, it consumes a lot of activated B3. So there's a system that creates more of that activated B3 where you still trip the fan away from the brain to make that. If you can't get tripped the fan into the brain, you're not making enough serotonin. You don't make enough serotonin, you're not going to make melatonin. So in a lot of cases too, we'll give someone a small amount of melatonin to see if that helps. And if it does, then we'll probably do is work on if they're not on an SSRI or not on to any type of antidepressant, we might give them a little bit of B6 and five HTP and see if that helps. And then that usually takes care of a lot of things. There's a lot of different angles you can go on to, to get somebody to sleep better, which almost always is going to lower their fasting glucose. And if it doesn't, in a lot of cases, I find a lower carb diet, a lower carb approach works pretty well too as long as they're not in a massive calorie deficit sure so actually not coupling the two calorie deficit and low carb maybe having one or the other yeah so maybe beefing up the protein quite a bit um beef up the protein quite a bit making sure you're having adequate amounts of uh of good good quality fatty acids and then when i say low carb i'm not talking like going straight keto right i'm talking like low carb for you and your activity so like low carb for me is 125 grams a day when i'm doing jiu-jitsu low carb for me is like 500 a day right um yeah you know when you're trying to like fit 15 hours a week plus conditioning and a little bit weight training you're going to need it right but um for somebody who's really overweight there's no real inherent need for carbohydrates whatsoever other than probably fiber and some phytonutrients so if they're really overweight we'll probably take them down to a fairly low carb and put them more more on a ketogenic style diet for a small period of time because that way they don't get those reactive hypoglycemia issues and then we're looking back at that kind of metabolic flexibility and improving people's use of different substrates i suppose exactly and once they lose a good amount of weight they lose a good amount of inflammation from that fat loss then eventually their carbs start to go up because they're going to need those because the performance goes up and their body wants more carbs okay look that we've we've covered so much different stuff it's gonna be so such i knew it was going to be like this from the course but we've just covered so much stuff it's so interesting i don't want to take up too much of your time so i'm sure you've got stuff stuff planned but i'll ask you a couple more questions just to finish off so we've actually already covered this in massive detail but just as probably a little bit of a summary for the whole podcast really is I tend to ask people what are their three best tips for people for improving or optimizing their health and performance so we've obviously already covered a lot of it but just as a little soundbite what are your three best tips for improving health and performance I think one thing is that to not put all your eggs in one basket like don't don't be married to a method or an idea and don't don't you know don't be married to your passion either because passion can really mess you up. And there's a book I highly recommend people, if you, you know, if you, if you like to read, and if you like to read, especially fantasy, I'm a big fantasy and sci-fi fans like Dune and other books. And I tend to read, what I find is a lot of sci-fi and fantasy it tells a story, but there's also lessons that you could learn from the characters and things. And so there's a book called Wizards First Rule. And in it, there's 13 wizards rules that every wizard kind of lives by. And one of them is the rule is passion rules reason. So if I get in the whole, the whole concept of the book is that reason should always be the cornerstone of all your decisions. Like it either makes sense or it doesn't and don't allow your passion to override your sense of reason That way you don't do dumb shit. So, you know, I love the lift heavy. I love

squat but right now I've got lower lumbar herniations I can't squat I have to do step ups and split squats I have to work around it as much as I want to doing too much squatting and and ignoring the niggles is what got me to a point where now I can't squat so or I'm having to like relearn how to squat so never tip number one is never let your passion destroy your performance and health. Point number two is make sure that you're getting information from multiple places. Like don't just sit in an echo chamber and get your information from just the people who you think are the experts. Don't appeal to authority. You see that a lot, especially in the evidence based crowd is just because somebody's name is on a bunch of research articles, it doesn't mean they have a good grasp on reality because what happens in a lab is usually very, very different than what happens in real life. Um, especially when you put like when you put humans brains and what they're going to do and what, you know, how they're going to, um, act outside of a lab. So making sure that you're learning and getting information from as many places as you can on how to control your health and making sure that the shit makes sense, right? It's just, it's like we say with the NHS, you know, God bless the NHS, but you know, sometimes doctors, doctors don't do what we do and we don't do what doctors do. So sometimes they're not the best people to get advice on nutrition and lifting and conditioning and training on because they're not taught that stuff, right? So you don't want to, just because a doctor says something doesn't mean that that's the way it needs to be. And you got to put everything else in context, just like if I've got an overweight diabetic, losing weight, losing that first 10 and then every 10 they lose is going to massively increase their health But what do I tell the guy who not at that level yet He just got type two diabetes and he really skinny because he lost all his muscle mass Like I can tell him to lose weight. So I want to make sure I've got multiple inputs of where I'm getting my information from so that I can, I can give both of those people their, their independent prescription that's going to be based for them specifically. Um, the third one is just, just fucking move more, man. Jesus, like, if you come in and you train with a trainer three days a week, that is not your only exercise. Like, don't, don't go train with your trainer for three sessions a week and give yourself a good pat on the back and be like, okay, I'm done for the week. or there's another 165 hours a week right you need to be getting a good quality sleep you need to make sure you're moving more if you sit at a desk like i do all day get up get up every hour and a half two hours and go for a 20 minute walk like and think about doing taking care of the simple shit before you think about taking care of the complex shit you know if you don't know how to eat you're you're you don't know how to diet then stick to what we know works eat a lot of veggies garnish it with meat, you know, make sure you drink a lot of fluids. That's pretty much as basic as it gets, right? So don't get confused and razzle dazzle. Take care of the fundamental things before you decide to get crazy and do the hoodoo voodoo complex things. Great advice. Yeah, brilliant advice. You know, you can't beat that really, isn't it? It's just taking them back to basics for people, you know, so that they're not trying to like go down that wormhole of finding a specific nutrient that's going to cure all my ills and it's like well let's just do what you need to do first you know hit those basic like kind of things that we need to be hitting and then we can think about those more kind of in-depth aspects of kind of health and nutrition everyone wants to know what the secret is and i i i can tell you i know what the secret is i can tell you exactly what the secret is be very consistent patient and do it for a long fucking time consistency is the secret being very compliant staying on track and doing that for a very long time is always the best long solution Amazing. So, Luke, where can people get hold of you? If people want to work with you, other coaches want to work with you, or clients want to get hold of you and kind of work with you guys, how can they get hold of you? Yeah, so they can email us at info at musclenerds.net. we've also got our instagram which is muscle nerds underscore health we're also on facebook just look up muscle nerds so any of those avenues if like coaches want to learn this stuff like what you learn in the the foundation stuff the program design we've got a couple of other things we do we do mentorships like long-term mentorships um online training we do all that stuff and pretty soon we'll have a gym hopefully to train at this might if we don't open the gyms in australia pretty soon this might be the first the the fastest purchase and bankruptcy of a gym ever so all right look it's been great having you on and i know anyone listening to this would have got a hell of a lot out of this you know and be able to take some actual points away to their training and their life and their wellness so really appreciate you coming on and hopefully we'll be able to have you back because i've got a list of subjects that we just touched on that i think we could just do a whole whole podcast about them themselves so really appreciate you coming on man well i appreciate you having me on anytime you want to do it just uh just let me know i'm happy to get on will do thank you okay guys wow what uh what an amazing interview um i'm just thrilled to be able to kind of pick luke's brains about those different subjects i mean we covered a lot of different subjects from kind of how to train you know athletes to be well conditioned for their sport to gut health to training for health and well We covered a lot of different stuff there So I hope there are some takeaways that you can start actioning and putting into your your lifestyle and your training and i hope there's some good stuff in there that's going to help you um you know fire me any questions that you've got about anything that we spoke about um and get in contact with luke and the muscle nerds guys if you want their support because they are really some of the top guys in the industry at the moment. Look, get over to our website, sign up to the Performance Hub as well, because there's a lot of information on there in the kind of ballparks that we discussed today. So if you're looking for more content around these subjects, the Performance Hub is a great place to go to start reading more and learning more about these subjects. We're also going to be running some challenges on the Performance Hub. So we're going to have everything that you need to start training and living towards a healthier lifestyle, laying those baseline qualities of aerobic fitness and movement quality that we spoke in depth about today. We're going to have a whole guide and a whole kind of setup challenge, if you like, on the members site. So keep your eyes out for that. It's going to be our survive to thrive challenge. It's going to be for guys and girls who are looking to take their training to the next level by laying the baseline qualities that you need, those foundational qualities of aerobic capacity, of good movement quality, of maintaining and supporting your well-being, your mental well-being, as well as your physical well-being. So keep your eyes out for that challenge because it's going to be really great and it's going to be coming in the next few weeks. Yeah, go and hit up Luke on his socials, hit us up on our socials. If you can comment, like and share on these podcast it really helps us to be able to get great guests like luke and stay tuned because we've got some really great guests coming up next week we've got a real big guest so so keep an eye on our social for that one and we'll see you next time