22 Luke Leaman - Why Less Is Actually More In Terms Of Fat Loss

# 22 Luke Leaman - Why Less Is Actually More In Terms Of Fat Loss

**Channel:** The Sean McGuinness Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

okay welcome to episode 22 of the sean mcginnis podcast and today we have a very special guest luke lehman on now luke is a world-class educator coach former powerlifter nearly a blue belt in jujitsu texting and bringing a refreshing approach of putting the health back in the health and fitness industry ironically um now luke in the last few episodes we talked about a lot about stress and my kind of near-death experience where I thought I was having a heart attack one day but it just turned out to be an anxiety attack from being a typical PT with lots of coffee and this was when interval training was very popular no sleeping no relaxing stuff so your least mode was basically created for my former self and probably your former self as well So what is the basis of Lease Mode, apart from the cool name? Well, I mean, really to understand it, let's go back to the start of how we came up with the idea, right? So a good buddy of mine, Zach Trowbridge, that has a nice facility in Chicago, we were laughing at people on Instagram that were, you know, hashtagging Lease Mode. We're walking them work out and we're sending videos of these people. I don't think these people understand what training hard really is. Like there's nothing, nothing in any of these videos that they're beasting anything. And you have to understand, like I come from a background, uh, like elite level athletics and, you know, I've been training, I've been weight training since I was eight years old. I started powerlifting at 14, um, after powerlifting, you know, and we basically are, our powerlifting team destroyed every single meet we went to. So, and then I kept powerlifting after that. And I eventually got tired of powerlifting because that was back when people started using the ridiculous supportive gear. And I never considered that. I respect what they can do with the supportive gear, but it was not for me. To me, it wasn't true strength. For me, strength is what can I do in shorts and a t-shirt, not, you know, a three-ply double denim custom. Now, you know, I'm training, I'm competing against guys that can barely lift 150 kilos in a bench and they go to a meet and they bench to 230. Right. And so I finally got enough of it and just stopped. So, um, yeah, so we were kind of having a giggle. And he told me he goes, haha, it's more like hashtag least mode. And I went, huh? that's pretty good so i wrote that down and then after after my tenure at pollocking group where i was teaching you know charles had i taught for them for a long time as an assistant charles left i came in and started teaching a lot of the stuff he was teaching with biosig and with the picp stuff started getting um mentored under dr james laval and his big thing was all cortisol right cortisol managing stress and he and i would have these arguments which was stupid because he He's a hell of a lot more brilliant than I am. I'd argue with him. You know, no, it's all about insulin and insulin resistance because that, you know, that's what I had learned. And then after I left, I started really looking into it, looking at the biochemistry, bioenergetics and things like that. And I went, man, he's right. I said, it's not really about the cortisol. It's about the stress. It's about having chronic, unmitigated stress. And cortisol is not the main thing you're looking at. It's just the one thing that people can measure because it has a long half-life. So the real problem is sympathetic overdrive and adrenaline, because adrenaline acts like an allosteric effector of your metabolism. And the sympathetic system is really, we're not that different than we were 100,000 years ago. I mean, I'm sure we can get into an argument on that, but let's just say 2,000 years ago. Our genetics have not evolved that much in the last couple of thousand years. What's evolved is and rapidly is our environment. So some of these systems we have that are supposed to protect us in nature aren't or they're very acute. They're not supposed to be ramped up all the time. And so I started looking at, you know, what I was teaching at Polycon Group, which is basically how to train people for the Olympics. and then I would go and I would train people like normal people like normal Karen and Joe and realize that man these are great techniques and all the stuff I'm learning but they can't actually do it what's what's the difference between them why can they not do it but other people can and I went man it's just a stress thing so we started getting into that looking at some of Joel Jameson's work and then we kind of created this system of the and the antithesis of beast mode, which is least mode. So it's more along the lines of really taking an assessment of what's going on outside of the gym. Like you have all of these different stimuluses and stressors that if you not recovering then you probably don need to be beasting yourself in the gym And then we just started noticing like people who are beasting themselves in the gym they always in chronic pain chronically inflamed They got gut issues sleep issues mood issues. So when we started looking into it, you know, the stuff they're doing in the gym, while that, if you were really, you know, healthy and had a good autonomic tone, they're really good techniques, but they're not for everybody. And sometimes it's like hitting somebody with a sledgehammer when all you really need to do is tap it with a hammer a couple of times so we said okay we need to figure out what's most important like if i really truly want to beast myself out in the gym i have to be healthy enough to beat myself out in the gym so we created lease mode and we also created our concept of prepping to prep um because we got a lot we have a lot of competitors that weren't in any shape to even start a competition prep but then they pick a show and they'd have to lose a tremendous amount of weight and do a lot of things that are very extreme to get them to the show and it would just destroy their health. So I finally decided when I left Follick and Group that I would create a company with my wife that focused on health first and performance secondary and something that no one else was teaching at the time, which is how to train normal people, right? Because if you go and get your Cert 3-4, yeah, they teach you the most bare basic bullshit Like it doesn't get you ready to train people, but continuing education is what really gets you understanding this stuff. And while they do teach you how to train gen pop, it's very generalized, ambiguous information, and it's not going to work for everybody. And, you know, I'm, I want students that understand this stuff to a level where they understand how complex it is, but they also understand how to make it simple for their clients, and how to choose the right weapon to get your client the right adaptation. And sometimes that means doing a little bit less, maybe doing stuff a little bit less intense. Maybe it's more volume or less volume. Maybe it's prioritizing aerobic conditioning over anaerobic conditioning. Maybe it's, you know, lifestyle stuff. All the different things that we don't learn in the Cert 3-4 to program in a grateful log or to program in meditation or to teach people how to sleep, like practice sleeping, practice meditating, practice taking naps. you know it's it's all that type of stuff that is really important that we don't really focus on because we're too busy focusing on sets reps uh advanced hypertrophy intensifiers and all this other shit that people aren't even ready for or qualified to do yeah amazing and i think most of the listeners of this podcast we kind of gem pop people try just getting into fat loss and obviously the big thing now is okay we're looking at calories and obviously it's great that people actually recognize like the mechanisms of how you lose fat but i think then people can get too tied up to that which is what where you're bringing it in so let's say mrs jones she's just calculated her calories it's came back 2000 to lose fat and obviously she cuts them in half because she thinks she's going to lose twice as much fat does heaps of HIIT training eats no carbs all the while not sleeping properly 40 hour work week stressed to bits with her family and then because She has no energy. She needs pre-workout and coffee to be able to train properly. Can you give the listeners how this is a great recipe for success or not? It's a terrible recipe. It's a terrible one. But it's what we're taught to do, right? It's like, okay, well, if you're not losing weight, you're either still overeating your calories or you're still not training enough. And, yeah, calories in versus calories out, that sounds very simple. until you understand that there's a lot more calories in than just simple mathematics, and there's a lot more calories out than simple mathematics. There's a lot of things that alter calories in and calories out. So you can leverage things like mitochondrial health. If your mitochondria is not working well, you're not oxidizing fuel very well. If your VO2 max is really low because you're out of shape, you need oxygen to oxidize things. You need good, healthy volume of mitochondria. You need cofactors, a good multivitamin. You need lots of B vitamins. You need magnesium. You need zinc. You need copper. There's all these things you need realistically if you want to be able to lose weight the right way and keep it off forever. So while sometimes eating a little bit less and exercising a little bit more, sometimes that is the answer. But for most people, I find it's not the right answer initially. It's not the right solution initially. And what I find is a lot of people already have disordered eating patterns and a disordered idea of what exercise is. So they use exercise to burn calories instead of using exercise to drive long-term adaptation. You look in the literature and you see all of these studies on the fact that people will tend to overestimate how many calories they burn in a workout. They tend to underestimate how much they eat I get that I totally get that especially especially with obese people There are people who are you know class one class two class three obese to the end and very very overweight But I train primarily other coaches. And those coaches, a lot of them understand how to track and we teach them how to track the right way. And so a lot of them, it's like, shit, man, if they're tracking and they're being honest with me, sometimes they aren't underreporting. We get people in here all the time that are eating, luckily, they eat 1,000 calories a day. They eat almost no protein, and they want to come in, and they want to train like crazy, and they don't understand why they're not losing any more weight. They're like, well, I hardly eat. You're right. You are hardly eating, but your body has adaptive mechanisms to save yourself when you go into starvation. This isn't any type of metabolic damage or starvation, what do they call it, starvation mode. It's just basically a maladaptation of certain biochemical pathways and your endocrinology. And so, yeah, if you're eating a thousand calories and being honest with yourself and you're training a lot, you may very well be stuck losing body fat. It might be time to stop dieting for a good period of time and let your endocrinology start to catch back up and focus on creating calories out by increasing muscle mass and increasing mitochondrial content, increasing VO2 max, so then you can process your calories in a better way. And that's, I think, where a lot of people are missing the boat is, you know, they don't think about the tools they're using and what the outcome is. And that's what we teach in our program design course is if we look at the concept of specific adaptation to impose demand, if I want an organism to adapt in a certain specific manner, I have to give it a certain specific stimulus. So if I put people on really low calories, the body's going to maladapt by under-converting thyroid and over-converting reverse thyroid. You're going to stop making testosterone effectively. you're going to stop making estrogen and progesterone effectively uh you're you're gonna stop growing your hair stops growing your nails stop growing your skin gets dry and flaky you get all of these subclinical hypothyroid type of symptoms your body heat goes down we'll measure people's uh temperature we get girls that come in and their temperature is like in the low 35s and they're freezing cold all the time they haven't had a period in 10 years so when we tell them that you know you've got to stop your disordered eating you can't live on a thousand calories we have to crank that back up um it's it's hard for them to understand that sometimes you're going to have to take a couple of steps back and then move forward again so part of part of that least mode ideology is to reframe your paradigm on what you think you need to be doing so that you can heal and then you can go to specific physical preparedness type things like then going into high-protein blockers, then going into something more specific once your body can handle this training. Yeah, and like you said, I think when we're talking about that, you make sure to recognize there's a few different groups of people. You can't just, we always can't group people into the same one. So obviously beginners that are very out of shape, yes, they just lack consistency in some regard and maintain a calorie deficit over a long time. but the people you probably see more of a kind of the intermediate to the advanced to want to kill themselves want to drop their calories and really want to get that and then they're just stuck in a vicious cycle so even with that obviously we'll get people in that sign up and the pure beginner they say oh yeah I want to train every day put my program and obviously when they see the calendar it's probably two or three wait stays and then you're just like, well, can you just get some walking steps on other days? How do you go about someone that loves killing themselves and may be kind of, quote, unquote, addicted to exercise, they think they need to sweat a lot and kill themselves in the gym, how do you go about actually pulling that person back a little bit and saying, well, this is going to get you more results? Because it's a bit of a mindfuck for a lot of people, especially girls. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, they need to understand that their body is going to adapt to whatever they put their environment in. So if I starve myself, my body will maladapt by lowering metabolic rate, lowering thermogenesis, becoming catabolic to muscle tissue, not just the fat tissue, but muscle tissue as well, those slow rates of oxidation. There's a lot of things that it's going to do. Same thing happens in a surplus just for different reasons, right? when I have people that they say they need to kill themselves in the gym I'm like okay cool we can do that because part of part of the misconception of what lease mode is people think that it's supposed to be you not you training and I don know if I have an ask if it okay for me to cut Cuss all you want I think they say honest people cuss more so fucking go for it I have a pretty bad potty mouth People seem to think when I started that lease mode idea, people thought that I meant it's going to be easy training but it's not. if I have somebody that wants to kill themselves and they think they need to be in the gym a lot I'm like okay that's cool I'm going to write something so fucking grotesque that you're you're going to last 20 minutes and you're done and so that's what we do so what we think about is we want to try to we want to try to get enough exposure to something to create that adaptation but we don't want excessive amounts of it it's kind of like Mike Isertel talks about with minimal recoverable volume and maximum recoverable volume, right? So what's the minimum amount I need to draw that adaptation? So if I'm not eating a lot of food, that's going to be very low. The more food I eat, the more I can train, right, because I'm supporting that. So if they want to train a lot, but they don't want to eat a lot, then that's fine. I'm going to write them a 20-minute workout that's going to put their, basically bash their dick in the dirt so badly that they don't want more than 20 minutes, right? So I might give them something like something we created called time death circuits. And it's kind of a play on Charles Poliquin's death circuits where we would do a giant set and we would do like a squat based exercise, a pulling exercise, a posterior chain exercise and a pressing exercise. But what Charles would do is he'd write it for three to five sets of 10 to 12, 410 tempo and then 60 seconds rest in between each exercise. So I said, you know, I looked at that, and that's always been a great method. If I think about a system that gets people really shredded really fast, as long as they don't get hurt, we look at CrossFit. What does CrossFit do really well? Very short, brutal workouts. And you go into any CrossFit box, and 80% of the people there are shredded ass, right? And so I said, okay, well, what can I learn from them? Well, they do short, horribly intense workouts. I said, okay, let's try the dead circuits, but let's not give them any rest. Let's just make them go exercise to exercise until they actually have to rest. So we tested it, and we tested it, and we found that, you know, if we give somebody a 20-minute block of training, if the weight is sufficiently loaded, they should be able to get three to five rounds or usually four to five rounds within that 20 minutes. If they do more than five rounds, they haven't loaded it enough, and if they can't get to four rounds, it's loaded too much. So we found this kind of magical area where it makes you sufficiently nauseous and like pukey, but while maximizing or minimizing how long you have to train. So we would do that for a week, and then the next week we might add another five minutes to see if they can get another round, and that way we take them from very short, brutal, intense workouts, and we build up their work capacity over time, and that works especially well when people don't want to eat a lot if they can if they want to eat a lot we can smash them with a ton of work but i think one of the main problems is that people aren't eating enough to support the performance okay so if you think about it i'll ask you this question because every trainer knows the answer what is the magic number that all women are told they need to eat if they want to lose weight it's the universal number it's only 1200 isn't it? 1200 calories. And everyone always nails that women are told to eat 1200 and guys are told to eat like this. And I get it. If you're, if you're lazy and you don't train 1200 calories, maybe for you, but the minute you start training, you have to support that. Right. Um, and the more you train, the more you have to eat because you've got to support that. So we actually don't even talk, uh, at, at the Institute of physical culture or what we teach. We never talk about fat loss and nutrition and we don't talk about muscle building nutrition we just call it performance nutrition and so if we call it performance nutrition it changes and reprograms the client's thought process of what they're doing with their food they've got to eat enough to support what they what they want to do right and then if we want to lose weight then yeah we need to be in a deficit but we need to calculate their calories on all the stuff they're doing first and then create a deficit on the top of that yeah that's so good so the performance institution that's a question we have down i love that but even when it comes to the training so someone's come in they they train every day it could be the typical person that goes to f45 or whatever and just like to smash themselves every day and and that endorphin rush and you're pulling them down but i love that where you're you're still matching their mindset we're going to train hard but you're kind of just giving them enough volume that the body can handle so if you program say that type of person typical type of person loves to cut their calories in half and tried to do twice

as much. Are you still putting two or three normal weight training days in, which is again, might be a bit low intensity, and then the days in between, are you putting that dead circuit? How do you program that out? It depends, because there's so many variables you've got to play with. How many days can they invest in training, what they're willing to do, willing to eat? I'll tell you, the difference between myself and most trainers is I have no problem offending my client. Like my clients already know, and I get that shit on the table in the first interview. So if somebody wants to train at the IOPC, I'll do an initial interview of, you know, 90 to 120 minutes. Like I take my time because I need to explain everything. We might be taking circumference measurements, ultrasound body fat, their weight, their injury profile. I might put them on the table to treat them, run through some movement stuff, see what they're capable of doing. And I just tell them straight up. I go, look, I've been lifting, I've been training for over 34 years, right? Training and competing, and I've been training other people for over two decades. I don't care what you've heard before you came here. I'm going to tell you how to do this. And if you don't like it, get the fuck out of my office. And they look at me like, what? And I go, I don't have a lot of time. I already know a work week. I don't have time. My staff doesn't have time to put up with any bullshit. So this is how it's going to go. you're going to do what I say or you're going to do what my staff says, or you can train somewhere else. And that you go, you waste my time. You're fired. And they look at me and they're like, well, I'm paying you. I'm like, you're right. I don't, if you're going to pay and be a pain in the ass, you're not going to train here. Right. And if you just say that to them upfront, that already sets the tone. And I have not had a single turd client here at the IOPC since we've opened. Like everybody's smashing. they're eating exactly the way i want them to you know a lot of them will have a lot of questions well i heard this i heard that you know i used to train with this uh ifb bodybuilder and this is what she had me do or he had cool um now you're you're in my office and you've lost 20 kilos and put 25 back on you lost 25 and put 28 back on you tell me how that other person's advice how's that fucking working for you and they just look at me and they're like okay i get it i'm like yeah no when you don't get it. We don't look at short-term solutions that create long-term problems. We look at long-term solutions. So this is the rate at which, this is your timeframe. This is how fast the body loses fat. This is what you can expect. Do you want to train or not? Don't waste my fucking time. So I don't give them the option. If they want to kill themselves, cool. Go do it at some other gym, right? If you want to do, I love deadlifts and you've got to bust it up lower back, you're not going to be deadlifting for a long fucking time until I feel like you can deadlift safely. You don't really get an opinion here. I don't run our online training or the IOPC. This is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship, and I get to tell you what the rules are. And if you want to train, cool. If you don't, cool. I'll refer you to a trainer who doesn't give a shit and is happy to take your money and just do whatever the fuck. And when they hurt you, come back in, and I'll charge you double to put you on the table and fix all your problems. But I think if you just come out of the box with that, one of two things is going to happen. They're going to respect you more, and they're going to do what you say, or they're going to get offended, and they're never going to come back. Either way, you win because if they get offended, they're not going to like my personality anyways because I'm a highly offensive motherfucker, right? they're going to be if they're going to be a turd client I don't want their money right so yeah are they coachable let's see you want to listen I'm going to train you like an athlete mentality get the fuck out of here go to go 45 I love F45 half of my half of my therapy business is people from F45 you and a lot of other physios as well um and on that okay so we obviously seen the person they may not listen or they may do listen you can coach them and they have fallen into that mentality of trying to do more and and eat less how does it kind of feed back in to um them binging out or eating for pleasure what's the actual mechanisms of it is it is it the chronically high cortisol can you run us through that because Because obviously people will fall into that cycle of 1200 calories, killing themselves every day, and then they wonder why they're binging out every weekend and gaining the weight back. Yeah so there a lot of different mechanisms going right You got nervous system stuff you got some your your brain is gonna win right you not gonna beat your brain so if you push it too hard for too long you're going to end up in shape and that's where a lot of people get to is training training gen pop they've got the most structure between Monday and Friday because they're at work now this is both a good thing and a bad thing if they're well prepared this is a great thing if they're not prepared. This is a horrible thing because what ends up happening, let's say, let's say I have a girl and I'm like, you're going to eat, I want to eat 1800 calories a day. Okay. But she's not well prepared during the week. And she ends up eating 1200 calories a day, but she's also training like an animal. What's going to happen on Friday night when she goes out for the girls, she's going to blow it out. So she's going to blow it out Friday night. She's going to blow it out Saturday. She's going to blow it out Sunday morning. And then she's going to feel guilty and starve herself for the rest of Sunday. And then she goes back to eating really low calorie on a Friday. So it only takes three to five days, you know, a massive low energy availability situation to create an issue with your metabolism starting to lower itself in a maladaptive state. If you go five days and you've got a quantity of metabolism, your body heat's going to drop um then if you go out and you binge for say 36 hours that's not a long enough period to reset some of these things right so that's one of the big things that we have is that people if they're if they're starving this is during the week yeah the metabolism is going to start to lower itself to protect you and then on the weekend and start binging. So then if you wash, rinse, and repeat this week to week, every week by Friday you're lowering the metabolism. You have a mass surplus. Your surplus is exponentially and relationally larger and larger every time you binge. So now you're like, Sean, I can't understand. I'm eating 1,200 calories a day. How am I getting fat? I'm like, okay, you're right. You're eating 1,200 calories a day until Friday, Saturday night when I see you on Instagram out eating Mexican food, drinking margaritas not sleeping like don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining i see you on instagram out posting at two o'clock in the morning out drinking and doing all this shit like it's okay to do that stuff but be honest with me because i can readjust what you're doing so now if we think about what's happening in this situation where they start still sabotaging and they might go into like binge eating and things like that when you have chronic stress that screws up some methylation pathways. And if you screw up methylation pathways, you're going to screw up tryptophan being turned into serotonin, serotonin being turned into melatonin. So you're going to screw up your circadian rhythm, and you're going to screw up your serotonin pathway. So you're going to be a little bit bingey on the weekends, a bit more carb-bingey on the weekends. You're going to disrupt the sleep cycles and not ever get really good sleep. And if that happens, now you've got an issue with, you know, hyperinsulinemia and the cell, the mitochondria aren't very happy. You can't increase pathways of building new mitochondria like you can do on alpha. So now your metabolic rate drops because your mitochondria get functional. You can get things like overconversion of T4 to RT3, which lowers your metabolic rate. You can get decreases in progesterone when cortisol starts to go up too high, and that leads to estrogen dominance, not from the fact that you have too much estrogen, but you might have too much unbound estrogen because hyperinsulinemia will normally lower sex hormone-binding globulin, so you have a lot more estrogen available, and your progesterone is being pushed into cortisol production. So when those two things get out of whack, you basically have matched on the gas pedal and you can't match the brake anymore. Thyroid binding globulin goes up. So now your thyroid gets all bound up. So now your metabolism starts dropping. So you've got all these different mechanisms, metabolic rate dropping, and then feeling a bit sad and depressed with a low serotonin, not sleeping well. Your ability to make dopamine starts to get disrupted. the more stressed out you get tyrosine is what makes dopamine tyrosine also makes noradrenaline and adrenaline so if i'm massively stressed out out of those three out of those three chemicals which two are most important for survival noradrenaline and adrenaline so if you're constantly shuttling tyrosine to make those your dopamine is going to go down and you're going to get decreased perception of pleasure so you're going to start pleasure eating in order to self Medicaid and pleasure drinking in order to self-medicate and for a lot of people, you know going out on the weekend and snorting cocaine to make yourself feel better Shit like that That the stuff I see right And that the stuff nobody wants to talk about is the drugs and the alcohol and the so what you saying is it not they lack willpower self and all these mechanisms that go off the charts and and then serotonin dopamine gov whack and decrease it and you try to fill that void from pleasurable food added to the fact that um we have an association with the weekend being pleasurable anyway so it's a recipe for disaster right the exercise too because if i if i have somebody who's addicted to exercise they're doing that in a lot of cases because it's filling in the gap of something you're missing they're like for me uh when i've done my genetic reports i don't make dopamine like i'm supposed to i don't transport it like i'm supposed to and then my receptors don't work well which is probably why i have adhd and why i have to take my bands keep my brain level and if i don't take that i fall into deep depression i have panic attacks and you know twice over the last uh six months or over the covid thing i ended up in the emergency room in texas because i thought i was having a heart attack uh then i had another one uh when i got home because we bought the gym and immediately had to close it so i started feeling depressed i didn't know why um i had a heart attack I had three or four days where I didn't sleep and I started hallucinating I was having auditory olfactory and visual hallucinations and then I start freaking out thinking I've got a fucking brain tumor so and the doctor here tried to put me on one of the strongest antidepressants you can get and at the highest dose and I went no I'm not taking this I'm like just give me some diazepam for the in case I feel panicky and then put me back on my ADD drugs that I stopped taking like eight or nine years ago that I'm supposed to be on, and that's fixed everything. So people need to understand it's willpower is dictated by neurochemicals. Your perception and your behavior is dictated by neurochemicals. Love is dictated by neurochemicals, right? So when those chemicals get out of balance, or when you have genetic issues where they don't work appropriately, well, you know, you're going to fall into a pattern of using exercise to replace an addiction, or booze or cocaine or sex or whatever, right? All at once. All at once, like I used to do one in my 20s. People need to understand that, man, it's really, you know, it's kind of your fault, but it also kind of isn't your fault. It's a lot of people's fault for not regulating their stress, but they just simply don't know. There's not enough people talking about that connection, and your doctor doesn't know. Their solution is to put you on 20 milligrams of Lexapro, which is insane to start someone on that, right? They're going to tell you to diet and exercise, but that's not very helpful because it's not giving you a path of what type of diet and exercise is correct for me personally at this time and how does that change. And then most trainers don't know how to bridge the gap between what's happening with someone's physiology and neurochemistry and what the doctor is saying versus what needs to happen in the gym. but their solution is to just keep dieting and be more exercised and usually the wrong type of exercise for that person at that time that's actually cool where you talked about genetic um dopamine receptors and stuff because i've seen research before where um i think they've done it on obesity and it just addictive and things in general where some addictive quote-unquote personalities have less like d2 dopamine 2 receptors in their brain and then obviously you want to feel that more through addictive things and that comes back one of the things actually written here is that although he may seem like a hard ass which is good but yeah because you're so knowledgeable you still have um silent level of empathy with that because you understand the mechanisms what's going on rather than your fucking normal pt who just shout to the client that they're not motivated enough so so just touch on that um briefly about some of the genetic stuff i know you have a course on trauma the psychological aspect that way um with addictive and things and people using food for that to fill that void yeah so we actually yeah so we we did of course i don't know if we're going to run that again or when we're going to run it again but we just actually i just filmed two days of a foundational nutrition um uh course that we're doing to go alongside our program design course so when we did the program design course it was a monster thing that we built over like three or for years. This time we're going to do it for the nutrition side too, but we're going to do it in phases. So instead of just like having all this information bashed into you, we're starting with here's the basics of the psychology of food belief systems calories relative energy deficiency syndrome protein carbs fats Basically here you go when you done with that here the next level And we just keep making add levels to go deeper into the biochemistry, deeper into the physiology, so that people can understand from a sports nutritionist perspective and from a psychological perspective what you need to be focusing on. I think one thing you keep saying is consistency. That's really the secret. People do mentorships and consults with me all the time, and they act like I've got some weird secret, right? There's no fucking secret. Like the secret is you need to be consistent for a long time. Now, that's easy to say. It's not easy to act on when people are desperate for results. And so when you become in a highly sympathetic state, your thinking portion of your brain drops out and your limbic system takes over. So you start being very reactive instead of proactive. You self-sabotage a lot. And then a lot of people have early childhood traumas or even adult traumas that they've got all this baggage they don't realize they have and they're not willing to get help. So for a lot of them, especially in our industry, if you want to see the most dysfunctional, fucked up people in the world, they're personal trainers. And a lot of the personal trainers don't realize how fucked up they are. And so what ends up happening is they've got, you know, issues of sexual trauma, psychological trauma, emotional trauma, physical trauma, all this stuff that's happened to them that they've kind of just swallowed and try to hide somewhere. And they go into personal training to help people because they won't help themselves. But you can't help anybody unless you get help yourself first. So, like I said, like 90 something percent of the people that we train online are other coaches. And it is difficult to get them, a lot of them, to do what they need to do because they constantly self-sabotage. They self-sabotage because they're not willing to go get counseling or trauma therapy. Their addiction ends up being training. And so they're addicted to helping people. Or at least most of the trainers I know, that's what they're doing. Like nowadays, everyone wants to be a trainer because they think it's an easy job that they're going to make lots of money at. That's why all these assholes, these business assholes are teaching people how to market funnels and sales and all this shit. And they're teaching this to trainers who don't know what the fuck they're doing. So they're basically selling you – it's like buying a car. They're selling you a really shitty car with all these busted up issues, and they're selling it at a premium price. They don't actually know what they're doing. Whereas I come from the old school of you learn how to be a really good coach first. then you charge more money right but like i've done lots of trauma counseling therapy and and people need to understand like it could have been the simplest thing when you were a kid that wouldn't even think was messing you up but you know when you're young your brain just it hasn't you know it takes until your mid-20s for your brain to finally finish maturing and getting to the point where you're totally cognizant of everything that's going on and you're aware of stuff. If your parent said something to you when you were five years old, you might not think that was a big deal, but your five-year-old self, that might have been a huge soul-crushing thing that can then affect your chemistry. It can affect your mitochondria and your biochemistry. It can affect your behavior later on in life unless you get that taken care of. So sometimes it's not about the food. Sometimes it's not about the training. Sometimes it's not about that. Sometimes unresolved shit that you need to get help on and that's the hardest thing to get people to understand yeah then even if going back to the point where you're pt if if you did have some kind of trauma you can just mask that by all the dopamine hits you get on instagram anyway that that that helps isn't it no but even on that point i actually had a client who um she suffered with bulimia and it was because like she came from an asian region country and their tradition is you have to fucking eat everything at the plate so then she developed the complete opposite thing later in life where she wanted to control back over her field so she's like nah i'm in control now which is one of the big triggers for for bulimia and stuff like that so um that could be a roadblock for a lot of people and you use psychologists obviously my degree is in psychology originally so you use that in a whole rounded way which i think people forget we have nutrition we have physios but how do you guys use that and refer out when needed um you know it's tough it's tough because you got to find the right therapy right like we we like the uh edm the edmr stuff the eye desensitization eye motion desensitization stuff but it's hard to find somebody that knows that they're doing like we've got we have a great trauma counselor in New Zealand but that that that helps if you're in New Zealand but it doesn't really help if you're in Australia or America or Europe so it's hard to find people in

You know, in a lot of cases, it's the same thing with, if you think about people who learn neurolinguistic programming and they learn, sometimes they're really good. Like, I've done a lot of NLP training, and I try to use it for good. I try to reframe somebody's mindset, reframe their narrative around what they're doing. But you get people that use it also for nefarious reasons, too. To pick up chicks. What's that? To pick up chicks. To pick up chicks or to sell people, you know. Yeah, sales ads, my son. they sell 101 as you got to find their pain point like you've got a problem let me see if i have the solution this is how much this is how much i charge for my services fix this problem but you get guys that will you get people that are overweight and they come in their office and they're like oh you need to you need to train with us because you're fat and this is bothering you and no one's gonna love you if you don't lose weight like they they sell them all this crazy shit get them trying to try to sell them training i hate that stuff see that stuff being in the psychology uh area you probably see this too like most uh and and you know i don't really know you well but a lot of us like people that go into psychology counseling they're real fucked up too yeah 100 yeah it's just like having a really good accountant who's their books are fucked and they're in massive amounts of debt, they can fix your shit. So it's hard to find, um, hard to find those people. So what, some of the things that we do is we, we look for red flags, what they're saying. Um, and then we try to, we try to work through the networks to find them somebody they can help out. And sometimes you have to go to multiple people before you find a good fit. Right. Uh, I like trying to find to someone who understands, um, the whole, the whole the hypothalamus role in the whole renal and also controlling the sympathetic nervous system i try to find counselors who understand that stress response but if you don't calm that down they can't get their limbic system to stop taking over and so they're not going to be able to rationally work through that stuff yeah it's always the way it's it's kind of like going to psychology for weight loss but they have fucking no idea about nutrition so it's like well the hell are you gonna you can't give any advice when it comes to that as well and especially like you're saying with um childhood traumas and stuff like that you could be going well on on a good plan but obviously something may trigger that and then that could be just your constant roadblock for for tripping out and binging over and over again right yeah i mean like for me i was just to tell you kind of my story um the why the trauma counseling and things is that when i i went to college to be a computer programmer. I started putting computers when I was a little kid. It's not what I wanted to go to college for. My mom wanted me to go to college to be a computer programmer. And I got through my freshman year and I went, I don't want to do this. I wanted to go into physical therapy and I wanted to be a strength coach. But back then, it wasn't cool to be a personal trainer back then. Only losers did that. It wasn't like it is now. And so I dropped out of college and I asked my parents to loan me $600 so I could get my first training certification and my mom basically laughed at me and she said I'm going to give you the money you got to pay it back in a certain amount of time and I want you to understand that this is only a hobby while you figure your shit while you get your shit straight this you'll never make a career out of this and so that one thing has kept me from maximizing my potential over the years and I had to go I had to get unfucked by going to New Zealand and having my friend go through that and to figure out what actually it was that was causing me to self-sabotage. And my self-sabotage throughout my 20s was, God, sex. Man, I was a sex maniac, right? And it was drugs and it was booze and it was all this stuff. And then it became, I said, okay, I'm going to channel that addiction into working a lot. And then I would work until I got sick or had panic attacks. And so I'm still working through that stuff. But I didn't realize it was that one thing she said that caused all this stuff to happen. And then it was a chain of other unfortunate events. It's like, I remember having to get really back from my breakup and we had a house together and I had to get my dogs off. And that little, that my mom's voice from the back of my head basically was confirming like, you're a loser. You can't even take care of these dogs. What are you doing? You're not worth it, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've had to work through that over a long time. So anytime I've ever seen, you know, a few weeks of success, I have a meltdown on a panic attack. So, and I found myself at a point where I was like, look, this is not going to go away until I actually go get help. And I went and got help. And now it's not a problem anymore. But I stuck in the prefrontal cortex and get that process back into long storage Yeah you always see that with people whose parents are kind of judged old school success or pure academia and they might be into art or music And then their parents are like, what the fuck are you doing? You're failing this test. And then that's how they kind of judge their self-worth. And then when they, again, like you said, if they go on a nutrition plan and they slip up, they just judge, well, I'm always going to be a failure. So what's the point of me continuing this on? they never get any momentum because they're constantly bashing themselves. And you see it, a lot of it's culture, a lot of it's religious. So part of what we talk about in our foundation nutrition course, I don't know when it's going to be finalized and edited and all that, but we talk about belief systems and we talk about religions and you need to understand other people's cultures, right? Like I'm a white dude from Texas. If I get a client from Asia, If I get a client from India or I get a client from China, that's a whole different culture and belief system that if I don't understand the dynamics, the family dynamics, the parental relationship with the kids, then I'm not going to really truly be able to help them because I can't understand how food revolves around their culture and also how hard their parents push their kids to be successful. right if you don't come from america you probably don't have any understanding of our sporting culture and how fucked up kids get because their parents think that they're they're going to be the next tom brady and they're living by kerosene to their kids and they end up screwing their kids up long term because they're pushing them so hard to be the next major league baseball pitcher or the next you know all-star quarterback um and they end up being like helicopter parents like This is all stuff that just messes kids up. And that can have a long-term impact on your neurochemistry and also on your metabolism. Yeah, and even, like you said, we obviously see tendencies where you're trying to mask whatever your pain is, quote-unquote addictive tendencies. But I was listening to Dr. Fanula McHale, and she had a childhood trauma. And she was saying she used to study and work to mask hers, which then, funny enough, as a society, we'll go, well done. you're working very hard there but you're that's such pure and healthy um mechanism which then is probably feeding back into the massive stress response like we're talking about in the first place by nutrition and training yeah and the thing is and i know her very well and she's she's had her own her own journey the last few years uh basically hitting the bottom and having to having to say okay i have to address this stuff because it's not going to go away if i don't um and i I think more people need to be honest having come to the food stock with themselves that they probably need to get some type of help. And, you know, it can be crazy. I was talking to another trainer about this this morning. Even down to things like, you know, we've been talking a lot about food, but what about exercise selection? Like if I get a client who has hurt themselves squatting a number of times, I may think that squatting is a great exercise, but the minute they see squats in the program, their brain switches from being safe to feeling threatened. They mount a massive sympathetic response. Their thinking brain goes out the window. The minute they put that bar on their back, their odds of getting hurt were probably close to 100% because now the motor pattern's screwed up. They're scared shitless of the weight. They're scared shitless of the bar. And I've gone through that myself with squatting where I did some stupid shit, hurt my back really bad, and I've had to learn how to re-squat again without being scared shitless of squatting. And so, you know, my solution with that was slower tempo training, changing what was on my back so I don't squat with a straight bar anymore. I only squat with a safety squat bar. Small changes like that can trick your brain into not being scared of it anymore while you work on now re-solidifying how you move and how the weight feels to you. So it can become exercise. can be really good or it can drive somebody's brain to a negative state if you look at food same thing if if you were raised and your mom constantly told you that you're eating so much you know in a lot of cases your perception is your reality and so a lot of a lot of women become bulimic or anorexic because their mom said some dumb shit to them or their dad thought it'd be funny to call them a little fatty um and they didn't realize like the dad thought that that was funny um and he was joking but to the kid they they didn't find that very funny and it destroys their self-confidence and then they carry that through their adulthood yeah parents and fucking PE teachers well they always they're ruining people's lives i swear if you're not if you're not athletically gifted they give you a hard time yeah man like i said i'm 42 now so i grew up in the state where you know in texas where high school football is everything like we start training weight training for football when we were like seven or eight years old and everything about Friday night lights and your coaches are very very hard on you And I grew up where we still had corporal punishment, so if you got in trouble, you got paddled. Like, I think we were the last class of 1996 that they outlawed that, but fuck, I can remember, I probably got smacked 200 or 300 times just in one year. Like, and we now know that that's probably not a great idea. but you know then the coaches were like super hard they came from a whole different generation and they were like you either toughen up or get the fuck out of here type of thing so they would you know they would belittle you and undermine you and do all sorts of shit thinking that that was going to make you tougher but and it did make some of us tougher but some of them it caused all kinds of issues later for other people yeah it makes for good netflix shows but it's going to cause a lot of fucking problems later in life. That's like even some people, some people respond good to, you know, fucking played short last week, you need to pick it up. But other people, that's going to ruin their confidence, whether that's in sports or it's in the classroom, it doesn't even matter. It's going to cause a lot of problems later on in life. And we're programmed for it, right? We're programmed. Like people are programmed to not feel good about themselves, to sell them more shit they don't need. Like, especially women. We're looking at Hollywood, man. I remember I was, I did stunts in the movie Varsity Blues, and I had become fairly good friends with some of the actors there. And one of them was Ron Lester. He was the guy that really big, really, really morbidly overweight guy. And a few years ago before he passed away, he had lost all the weight, tremendous amount of weight. No one would hire him for movies anymore because his whole identity surrounded about being the 425 pound fat guy. and it ended up screwing with his head man and i can't remember if he told himself what happened but the uh it's it's the culture were brought up and and really telling people to you know shoot for a shoot for a body and a physique and a mentality that's just not attainable for a lot of people and you know telling people that you know you need to be stronger you need to be fitter you need to be this and a lot of times the personal training industry they people tend to glorify things like being really strong like how fucking strong does joe dingleberry from next door need to be like um you know he you get clients to come in and joe might just want to look down and see his dick for the first time in 20 years like he doesn't care about squatting 300 kilos and then you make him do all this shit that's not conducive to what he wants to do and flipping tires and all with the dumb shit that people flipping tires and hitting tires with sledgehammers like what fuck are you training people for yeah they just say i think they're just seeing that on the youtube motivation all that kind of stuff anyway but one of the things one of the reasons why i love listening to luke and all his lectures and courses is okay i think one of the good and bad things like we talked about is today people are gaining more knowledge about calories in calories out but then again like we talked about although it's simple in theory in practice there's so much that feeds into that your mechanisms physiology psychology all this kind of stuff so then when people aren't um maybe that that outlier where you're not losing weight we are doing everything they think well i'm just fucked like what am i going to do now i think that's what luke is is educating coaches and hopefully they can um educate their clients as well but that's that's kind of a big issue now as well isn't it with the calories in calories out model yeah and you know the thing is it's trainers need to understand most trainers don't know shit about nutrition because they just don't they don't prioritize their continuing education and they also don't understand a lot of the physiology behind what happens when you train with weights and if you don't, I really like Stephen Covey's quote, seek first to understand and be understood. Your client cannot understand shit that you don't understand yourself. So this is one of the, one of the battles I have with a lot of my clients here at, at our gym is that they're used to losing tremendous amount of weight, you know, starving themselves doing boot camps and then the weight coming back on. So I'm like, okay, you know, if you want to keep doing it that way, you're just, you're going to keep getting the same result that you have been. Let's play the long game. Let's build strength and muscle. Let's put the focus on performance metrics. So we're going to focus on how strong you're getting. We're not going to focus on your scale weight because when I, when I take a brand new client and I tell them that even if we don't pump their calories, if I take a girl who's eating a thousand calories, like, okay, we're going to work on 1200 calories. We're going to try to nail that. Most of them are severely under reading protein. so it pretty much on average about 60 grams of protein a day if they lucky well i pump them up to 120 to 180 grams of protein So if I give them some weight training which is going to stimulate an anabolic response and then I give them sufficient amounts of protein, they might not lose any weight for the first three or four months unless they're doing excessive amounts of cardio, which we don't recommend. For a lot of them, we have to constantly pump them up. Now that you're actually training with weights correctly and you're eating a protein, your scale weight's not going to go down, but you're going to get smaller. So we're using a lot. I don't put people on the scale here because it demotivates them. It demoralizes them. But we might do circumference measures and things like that. So that way they can see the circumference measures going down to their waist or their head. Because, I mean, the thing is, like, people self-identify with the scale. And so if I ask a lady, you know, how much do you think you weigh? I don't, I don't, it doesn't have to be perfect. I just need to know so I can calculate your calories and things like that. A lot of them will say they haven't been on the scale in like a year and they remember being 70 kilos and I'm looking at them going, oh, there's no way you're less than 80. So if I put them on the scale, that's immediately going to screw their head. So we don't even put anybody on the scale until they're ready for it. Because if they get on the scale, they're going to want to slash the calories. And most of them aren't eating enough, you know, daily, you know, they're, they're binging and purging but what they're doing is they're they're under eating and over exercising until they binge and they're going they're not sticking their fingers down and throwing up but it's still a bulimic style of thing it's just a long-term like a global bulimia type of thing so yeah we have to we talked to them about the realistics of the physiology that when you train and you provide an anabolic response it is most more like more than likely you're going to put on muscle so fast you're not going to see a lot of skill change and as you put that muscle on and as you do hypertrophy training you're going to be storing more glycogen and that glycogen is going to store water and that's going to bring sodium in with it too so you're going to look bigger and fuller and your weight's probably not going to move that much right so we try to take a lot of their ideas and we take it away from food we take it away from the focus being on the calories and we focus more on the macros. If they're tracking their macros, the calories will naturally fall into place and we prioritize protein and then we look at fat and carbs as if you want the simplest solution, you can have fat or carbs, it doesn't really matter as long as you tell me what you like to eat. I prefer to put people on a lower carbohydrate diet initially than ramping carbs up over time as difficult as possible because now they can store glycogen more effectively. right um but we we take the focus and put the focus where it really matters which is let's work on getting stronger let's focus on your waist and your hips going down and let's focus on you know your calves and your arms going up and i'm like oh that's weird i'm like yeah but that's that's showing us the building muscle and let's focus on the fact that you could barely do a seated cable row of 12 and a half kilos for 12 reps and now you're doing it 15 reps for 30 kilos so we change their mindset about what's most important. And then we can start working on the calories later. But I like what Dr. Lauren Fannick says about calories. We don't eat calories. We eat food. And, you know, one of the things I teach in our courses is calories don't actually exist. And when I say it, people are like, oh, that's beautiful as shit. I mean, think about it. What is a calorie? It's a unit of measurement, right? Now, there's a certain amount of energy stored in the food, but there's no such thing as an actual calorie that you can hold and see. Just like if I look at a foot or a meter or a yard or a mile or a kilometer, I can't actually see that. It's just some way I measure things. So we talked to our clients that we are measuring calories as how much total volume of food we're eating, and then we focus on macros of what that food is now constructed of, right? And that some food has more of a calories out than others. So we prioritize protein and we leverage a lot of dietary and just thermogenesis. And then we focus on carbs and fats, depending on if they're more or less insulin resistant or depending on how heavy they are. They're really low with low carbs. Yeah, I love that. You're kind of two steps ahead in regards to the mental relationship people have with losing fat, which is just a lot of restriction. and a lot of fucking disappointment and you're putting different metrics on that when when you hit okay everything else will take care of itself your focus on waist measurements circumference eating for performance train as hard as you can recover and you know the body's gonna be in a better state to probably inherently eat less calories anyway because you're hungry and appetite will regulate itself and then and I hope you're gonna mean the whole different

and psychological mindset from that. Yeah, we try to teach that food is fuel, right? And we have to eat more if they want to train more and get better. And that, you know, food can be fuel or it can be pleasure. And we need to disassociate our emotion and understand the difference between those two things. And it's okay to eat for pleasure, but you have to first get a foundation of eating to support bodily structures. And then we layer on pleasure foods after that. Um, but I think too, like one thing is when you pump their protein up, they end up, they end up realizing they're snacking more than they thought. And a good number of the ladies that we train here, once you pump their protein up and they're eating like 150 to 180 grams of protein, they realize that for a couple of weeks, they're not snacking anymore. And they're actually having a hard time getting their food in. That's when I know that they're struggling with success because if I'm not that hungry, then there's a good chance that I'm supporting that calorie deficit and body fat. And that's the key is that you can't really be, if you think about it, you can't really be in a calorie deficit. You either get it from food you're eating or food you've eaten previously. If you're in a true calorie deficit, you're starving and you're going to die, right? And if you want to see what that looks like, look up pictures of All Switch or look up pictures of like the Minnesota Starvation Study. Like that's at a point where you're in a true calorie deficit, but your body will make it up either with exogenous food or stored food. It just depends on how you play the bioenergetics to get the body to tap into that. And I think the last thing, one of the things we talk a lot about with our clients is stop obsessing about the product because what you're doing is we've got girls that show us all these pictures of women Oh this how does she look like this How does she look like that And I know a lot of these girls and I like well number one they on drugs and you not Number two you 45 and she 26 All that girl does is train eat, sleep, and poop. And you actually have a job and kids and responsibilities other than that. So stop comparing yourself with all these other people, because that's just going to lead to disappointment and stop. You need to get stuck in the process. So be process focused, not product focus because if you're if you're so obsessed about the product and you're not getting stuck into the process then you're always going to be disappointed that you don't look the way you want to look yet that you're missing the whole point is to enjoy the process watching your body transform over time and you'll get there eventually when it's time for your body to get there yeah unbelievable yeah and i think it's a shock for a lot of people looking instagram their their favorite um insta chicks pumping heaps of steroids and just sitting on only fans all day but that's yeah that's their job now the problem we're talking to luke is we could go on all day okay so luke unbelievable give me a little bit of rundown for everyone listening what products and stuff you haven't gone on um well obviously we have courses with the covid are you going online what are you up to yeah most of our stuff's online right now so we've got the the long format program design course that people want to go through a whole full time so we have usually right now we have open open enrollment because uh the covid thing people have time to study but um there's there's about i can't remember how many hours of content but there's at least at least a couple of hundred hours so it's it's one of those courses you just got to understand like this is this is a long-term commitment that you're getting into. We have in our three intakes, we have fortnightly calls during those So there there like you know probably 40 40 something calls a year And and all of those calls are reported so you get over 100 hours of pre calls that are time stamped so if you you're looking through the things you can see oh they're talking about this I want to go there we've got videos we've got all kinds of assessment stuff we go through passive range of motion active range of motion manual muscle testing exercise selection sets reps time and retention stress response reds we talk about all the stuff that you need to know of how to design a program a long-term periodized program that makes sense and it's also fun and creative so it needs to make sense of what adaptations but your clients also need to enjoy doing it so there's an element of creativity and and it's okay to have fun when you train and then we've got a forum for questions and answers and things like that and then we also we're coming out with a nutrition one next so um we'll have that and we're going to layer on other things, more sports specific stuff, nutrition stuff, biochemistry stuff. We've got, what else? Foundations we're not going to be able to do for a while because of COVID. I can't travel and teach. And that's indefinite. We're going to do that. The program design does come with in-person practical days because some of the PROM and AROM and muscle sets, we can actually go over the whole thing and learn how to do it and how to do it correctly. And then how that relates to the anatomy, not just anatomy, but applied anatomy. selection of what you're doing. We also do mentorships. We have a year-long mentorship. We do consults. We do online training. Most of our successful coaches will do basically done everything plus we train them so they get put through the process as well. It's crazy to me too because we just started this stuff to help. I've been doing this a long time and I want to do the right thing. There's too many people in the industry who are doing the wrong thing So we said we do the opposite And doing the wrong thing usually allows you to build a business faster but doing the right thing makes it more sustainable and ethically the way to do it But most of our students that have done like program design mentorship and training with us have basically gone from – we don't teach almost no business stuff. It's just getting results. And a lot of these guys were making, like, $40,000, $50,000 struggling as a trainer, and they're now making $150,000 to $200,000 a year, not because we taught them how to market and sell, but because they sell up there it's easy for them to sell themselves because they're they can talk to talk walk the walk and they can get the results so yeah yeah i was i was actually gonna say i was like save your money stop buying online marketing you don't need that you just need to become better trainer your clients will talk tell other everyone else so invest in the courses luke's course i couldn't recommend highly enough i'm actually going to sign up to his program design after this but all the content he puts out is unbelievable so yeah save your money for your fake Rolexes put on Instagram and just become a better coach that's it guys stop taking advanced bat laws advanced hypertrophy advanced anything your clients aren't qualified to do anything advanced and you don't know enough to do anything advanced anyway so leave the bands and the chains and the weight releases leave it at home get really really really ridiculously good fundamentals and the basics because those always work. Once you get good at solid the basics and teaching your clients how to be patient and consistent, then we can do stuff. Yes, so go sign up. Okay Luke, I couldn't thank you more for today's episode. It's been absolutely unbelievable. Definitely get you on again. And thank you. Luke, you're a legend. appreciate it