185 Luke Leaman chats about the biggest dieting traps fit shaming how to be a good client BCAA

# 185 Luke Leaman chats about the biggest dieting traps fit shaming how to be a good client BCAA

**Channel:** The Shane Walsh Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

hey guys and welcome to the next episode of the Shane Walsh fitness podcast so today we have absolute fitness royalty and this is one of those episodes that one of the other coaches Dallas has is super super excited and it was one of those episodes I had to send to Dallas straight away for him to to kind of listen to so today's episode is with absolute royalty and fitness royalty is Luke Lehman so Luke has been a prominent figure in the health and industry with the mantra of health over everything his teachings research and knowledge boldly reflect that and he's been in the industry for many many years and he has spent the last nine years educating coaches trainers and health professionals around the world on biochemistry physiology with a large focus on the application of his knowledge with 20 years of knowledge and experience in the industry 15 years experience powerlifting 10 years experience in bodybuilding and 30 years of experience training he has spent massive massive amounts of time money and effort into the trenches earlier on his career luke's but sought out the best in the fields of internships and learned from the best worked with the best and his thirst for knowledge and research has given him an in-depth understanding of biochemistry in relation to fat loss stress management hypertrophy digestion metabolism and hormonal imbalances for three years luke traveled with the pollocking group which charles pollock was one of the leading industry uh one of the leading people in the industry for a very very long time and he was lead instructor writing and teaching biosignature modulation as well as teaching this the picp program lucas mentored under world renowned strength coaching stroke trials poliquin as well as dr james lavelle formerly of the lavelle metabolic institute and author of cracking the metabolic code over then since then he has set up muscle nerds which was one of the biggest education portals and resources for pts and those in the industry um that are looking to better themselves and understand that he writes the muscle courses stuff himself he has a desire for coach for coaches to be the best possible possible they can and in this episode we talk a lot of stuff um and we talk about how instead of focusing on the next shiny diet go for what works for you one of the biggest traps you see that people go for what part of weight loss do most people overlook we talk about the truth about BCAAs we talk about how to move away from cardio as a way of losing weight the tips on how to see a great client or be a great client is really really interesting kind of advice for someone to move away from the all-or-nothing approach the most underrated exercise that exercise that you are actually not doing and the one thing that it would remove from the fitness industry so I'm going to put up a little bit of a warning before and Lucas for you no nonsense there's a bit of cursing in the episode and there's it's it's it's off the cuff but it's the way luke is he's quite direct and i had the absolute pleasure chatting with him for a while uh off air and off air and on air so without further ado here's episode with luke leeman luke how are we sir i am going good how's it going i'm very good my man um so anyone who doesn't know luke luke is one of the ogs of the fitness world and i know dallas who's one of the coach that works with myself is uh very excited to listen back to this so luke i think we're gonna go straight into it because i gave the intro for yourself uh or fair so i think the the dieting industry is a little bit all over the place at the minute the fitness industry has the evidence-based people and then it has the extremists and one of the big things that a lot of people kind of fall into and they fall into the biggest traps with dieting and stuff one of the biggest traps you see people fall into with their diet when it's kind of coming to kind of losing weight um you know look there's a lot of fad stuff there's always fad stuff um if there is something some bullshit to sell somebody somebody's going to figure out a way to market it and sell it and you know it sucks because the the consumer gen pop people have no idea i mean athletes have no idea what they're supposed to be eating um gen pop don't have any idea what they're supposed to eating so they get they fall into this trap of you know excluding certain macronutrients or excluding certain types of foods or you know massively starving themselves to get there or that i think the latest one is you have the instagram and that's a whole other that's a whole other bag but you have these people on instagram gloating about oh i'm dieting on like 3500 carbs and I'm getting shredded. It's like, yeah, are you, are you really, what else are you doing? And you get a lot of people that buy into that. Oh, I don't actually, I don't have to diet to lose weight. I can eat more and lose weight, but you can't like, you can't like, that's not how this works. So there's things like that, you know, so it's a constant battle when you're, when you're dealing with people and doing nutritional consults and writing these things and programming for people trying to tell them stop looking at all these shiny objects We have a pretty good good foundational knowledge of how this shit works Um and I tell you the one the one issue most people have is they they just not consistent and they not accurate for long enough You know, um, this whole anti-diet thing, anti-diet culture, get fucked. Um, they just, they've lost the plot. You know, it's anti-tracking, anti-this, like, fuck, man. You know, when you look at the people who have the most, if I show you files and files of people that we deal with that have the best results, it's always people who are willing to track at least for a small amount of time, people who are willing to find foods that they like to eat pretty consistently every single day. And then when they get bored with that, they move to something else. And, you know, it's the people that can be very accurate and they have accountability and they track long-term and they nail things and then you get them a really good, fast, safe results. And then you slowly start taking away some of the stuff that you don't actually need, right? Like you don't need to track forever, but you do need, as long as you don't have an eating disorder or some other obsessive issue, then yeah, you normal people that don't have a pathology should probably weigh and measure a little bit of their food for a little bit of time because they have no idea how many calories and things they think that they're eating 1200 calories and then when you sit down with them they're eating twice that sometimes even three times that so a lot of it's an issue of low nutritional literacy and then a lot of bullshit online why do you think so many people are kind of against the whole thing of counting calories why is that kind of out there i know with eating disorders and stuff that's a very very different episode yeah that's a whole different thing like uh i don't deal with people eating disorders. If someone comes to me and says, I have had bulimic anorexic, I'm like, cool, I'll write your training, but I'm going to refer you to a dietitian that's a specialist in eating disorders. We do, we have people that we work with dietitians for this type of thing. They don't track anything. What they do is they write down everything they eat or they take pictures, they send it to us. We go, okay, I see you've got a cat. Maybe we switch that for an apple. Can you do that. Cool. So we do stuff like that, but we never put a number or an amount. So we never do that without a dietician's involvement. But I don't know, man, it's, it's just getting acceptable to not be fit anymore. And it's getting like, it's getting people who work out now it's weird. Like that's kind of the way it's moving now. It's almost unpolitically correct to want to be fit. so we've gone from we've gone from assholes in our industry doing all fat shaming and all that and that's really bad but now it's a bunch of fit shaming too like you're really weird if you eat clean you're really weird if you eat you know like i when i diet i'm boring i don't like hyper-calorable foods or i'll binge right this is normal thing i'm getting ready right now for photo shooting video stuff and i basically eat chicken thigh rice and veg i love it i can i can eat that all the time. That's not for everybody. But people would think nowadays that that's super weird. But 20 years ago, when I got in the industry, that was totally normal. That's fine. Eat fish at every meal, chicken at every meal, low fat, moderate carb, high protein, nothing weird about that. But now it's become this really weird thing. And people are starting to demonize something that should be a really good tool to give you accountability and let you set a bar of where you're at and then you can say okay i'm eating this many calories and i'm training this much okay why am i not sleeping well why am i not losing weight why am i gaining weight why am i holding water why do i feel irritable okay maybe we need to bring those calories up or down but if you don't measure it you can't manage it that's huge and i think exactly i think it's peter drucker that said that as well in relation to when you're kind of eating the foods they're eating getting ready for your shoot and stuff how have you ever had that whole thing about that fit shaming and how do you deal with the comments yourself and how do you kind of knock them away yeah um i have actually i have i remember years ago i got out of the industry for a short period of time i was just kind of done with it you know i was i was one of those crazy trainers was i was the first dude at the gym like me and another guy and we were the last two dudes to leave and we would train all day there was none of this like four-hour work week bullshit we were in there we love training. We were in there training 15, 16 people a day, just nonstop. And then I just, I got burned out after a little bit of time because I was working at goals. It was a lot of corporate bullshit, too much drama and politics that I didn't want to be involved in. And so I went into the IT industry. So I went into back in the computers and audio visual and stuff that I did there. It was my first office job. And so I had just come off a bodybuilding show I walk into this building I like 220 pounds Coming off the show I probably still sitting at like eight 9 body fat And I walk in and now I become the expert in this office environment This is the guy you want to talk to if you want to lose weight. If you've ever worked in an office, it is the most toxic fucking place ever with the most unhappy fucking people I've ever dealt with. Um, so in an everyday, somebody is bringing us bullshit. Like you go to the fridge and there's donuts and there's all sorts of crazy shit in there that cakes and all that. And I love that stuff. But I didn't want to like I didn't want to eat that post contest. I wanted to ease my way back into it. So because I already know coming off the show like that, you're depleted. That's exactly what you want. And if you give your brain that it's going to want more and more and more and you can't control yourself. So I kind of ease back into that. But first week there, people asking advice. I'm like, I don't really want to do that. I just want to work. I don't really want to. All right. I'll give you a couple of tips. By the second month, lady turns around. She's got a pizza. She's basically giving a pizza blowjob. She's got this thing halfway down her throat. Looks like a fucking snake eating a rat. And she looks at me and she goes, don't you fucking judge me? And I go, hey, dude, I don't want any part of this. And then now I became the fucking Satan of this office. Oh, he's the fit guy. Don't eat pizza in front of him. Oh, he goes and works out on his lunch break. I was like, fuck, man, I can't do this anymore. And I actually it was so stressful. I walked in there at 220 pounds, you know, single digit body fat. I walked out of there a year later, 24 percent body fat, 216 pounds. jesus and i actually at that point i become i became very empathetic and i was like i can see why all of you pack on 20 30 40 50 kilos after working here for a few years because this place is so fucking miserable that all you want to do is self-medicate with food and booze i've been in that office environment when it's not when it is quite toxic and it is kind of you kind of you if you are starting to die if i start to struggle with my weight kind of in my 20s it's like monday to wednesday you'd behave thursday friday saturday sunday just press the fuck up and go and go wild so i can understand that side of things so it's kind of not sitting on an ivory tower i've done the shit i've done that side of stuff you might mention about the kind of the shiny diets and all that kind of fad diets and stuff why do people not focus on the stuff that actually works for them or is it just due to a lack of education and empathy towards themselves it's a lot of it's a lack of education it's a lack of just basic biology not understanding how this goes, not understanding basic algebra of input versus output. And I do think that a lot of the industry, they simplify nutrition a little too much and they just treat it as A minus B equals C. And yeah, that does work for some people. It doesn't work for everybody. And you have to look at, you've got this mathematics problem, but then you also have the biology of things where hormones are moving things around, making things go up, making things go down. You have stress, making things go up, making things go down. So if you get people, like you said, the evidence-based guys, if it's not on a paper, it doesn't exist. It's like, well, hold on. Like we've got, you know, a hundred years of bodybuilding and they kind of figured this shit out. A lot of the new research is keeps moving towards the recommendations that bodybuilders have been talking about since 1950s so um i think that i think that people especially coaches personal trainers need to get a deeper understanding of biology you buy a book fucking dummies guide to biology and learn how the body actually works instead of just doing your weekend certification and thinking you know how the body works go get biology for dummies learn how this stuff works so then when you're actually thinking about what you're doing with clients, you have a deeper understanding of, hey, this worked with this person. This is why it worked. Oh, it didn't work with this person. Now I need to figure out why it didn't work because everybody has biochemical individuality. So they're all going to need something slightly different. And as they get more fit and as they get stronger and build muscle, those things can change over time. So you have one side of the industry saying there's a one size fits all for everybody, which is just keep pulling food and doing more exercise. Then You have the other side is like, oh, no, you're fat because you're a carnivore. You need to do a vegan diet. Oh, no, you're vegan. You don't get enough carnitine. You need more meat. And you have all these people arguing and basically insulting other people's belief systems. It's like, hey, look, all these diets work. If it's the right diet for you and you feel good, cool. Now we go back to calories and now we go back to exercise and then everything's good. But if you don't, if you're not on a diet that works well for you personally, it doesn't make you feel good and you don't like, you're going to binge. You going to overeat You going to overeat subconsciously and not even know So there man we could go on for hours about all the shit that fucked up about this um binging and purging like binging food and purging with exercise there's that type of thing that to me that's another that's just bulimia it's just a different mechanism i overate this weekend so i'm gonna run it off yeah you got you that was kind of the next question in relation to how to kind of move away from seeing exercising cardio as a way of losing weight rather than focusing on the actual pillars and building a house not made of matchsticks but actually putting the effort and the foundations in property how could how do you move people away from seeing that particularly i think unfortunately it's kind of targeted at girls i'm not trying to be sexist at all because uh that's not what i want to do at all but i do think girls in the media are pushed that kind of cardio cardio cardio over weights weights weights if you know what i mean yeah no absolutely it's not sexist to say that It just, it is what it is. If you're speaking the truth, there's nothing misogynistic or sexist about that. Women get targeted because they're more likely to be consumers of this information. Right. So when I got into the industry, it wasn't cool to be a trainer. Like you, you tell your parents, you want to be a personal trainer. They disown you. Like my parents, my mom told me this will only be a hobby. You'll never make a career out of this. Now, now it's like super cool and trendy. I know kids who are 15, 16 year olds who are selling online training right now. They don't know shit. What are you doing? Like, it's a really fucking crazy time for industry. But when I got into this, no girls lifted weights. It was all cardio cardio. And it was coming off the back end of like Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the father of modern aerobics. It was, it was a lot of that stuff. There was, um, you know, people were eating a lot of higher fat foods and then you got the cholesterol hypothesis. Now everybody stopped eating fat and went to low carb stuff. So now the food companies go, cool, we'll just pull all the fat out and feed you with sugar. Well, that made people binge. So they were more likely to eat more stuff because they got wild swings in blood sugar. They can't control their hunger cues. And then it got to in the 90s. Then the new Atkins Revolution diet came back out and South Beach diet and all this stuff. And then everybody went more towards the keto side. So you keep seeing this pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. and it's I don't I honestly don't think it'll ever go to the middle because this is part of our industry everyone's extreme one or the other and everybody's always on one side versus the other instead of just if you were just like Switzerland and go cool vegans I like your diet I wish it had more meat but you're a vegan you got ethical reasons you got religious reasons we're going to work with that okay cool you hate veggies you love meat cool we're gonna do the carnivore diet that's fine like just work with what people are going to give you um don't try to argue against their belief systems you're never going to change someone's opinion by arguing with them all you can do is try to get them to see like your point of view and make convinced let them convince themselves but honestly you know it's just it's it gets really frustrating that you have to fight against this stuff and and uh and telling people things like you cannot run a bad diet. Okay. That's a big one, right? People think that, well, I'll just run more or I'll lift more to offset this shitty diet. And when we bought our gym, so we bought this gym about a year ago, and I've just had to have this massive conversation with a lot of the people here. It's like, look, you've been training a year. You're getting really strong. Your exercise looks good. You're upset that you haven't lost much weight. We need to have to talk about food again. Oh, I don't want to have that talk. No, we need to have that talk again, right? No, no, no, no. I'll just, I'll come in and run more after I, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. You have energy constraints. Your body's going to fight that. You're never going to outrun that. Well, can I, is there anything I can do to outrun that? Yeah, cool. Let's train you for a hundred K ultra marathon. Fuck that. All right. then stop shoving shit in your mouth because that's realistically the only way is if you're burning 10 000 calories and running and then you're probably going to overcompensate with shit anyways so you're just basically running on a hamster wheel you're just a hamster do you ever think the industry is going to get regulators um i don't know i don't know because how do you regulate it how do you regulate online training a lot of guys moving online training how do you regulate if i'm training in australia kind of under the under the carpet and i'm training people in america how do you regulate that yeah europe how do you write you know it's it's almost impossible to do that it makes sense to do it yeah like i spoke to phil learning one of the guys over in the uk on the big edge case in the uk and he was like it's now it's i don't think it's ever going to be done in my lifetime i don't think it can be done to be honest yeah it is a shame because there's too many gimps or even the advertising authorities need to step in and

Because I know over in the UK, they brought in some regulation for the mental health that if someone has cropped their body, that they have to put like a watermark on their Instagram post or their social media post. So that people are aware that that has been talked to, their legs have been tucked in or their stomach's been tucked in and stuff, which I think needs to be brought in. You talk about there kind of being the clients and kind of moving them away from cardio and stuff. Have you any tips on someone who's getting coached by someone on how to be a great client? Because I think there's all these tips of how to be a great coach, which some people take on, some people don't. But I think people forget how to actually be a great client. Yeah. Yeah. Can I say one more thing? How do you convince people that it's not the running all that? Because I forgot to say this off the back end of what we're telling our clients. When they said, well, I'll just train more. I said, OK, let's let's think about this. what's the purpose of you lifting weights? Okay, it's to build muscle and get stronger and become bulletproof. Or if you're dieting hard, it's to preserve muscle tissue and try to preserve strength as much as you can. Why do you get on the treadmill or the airdyne or whatever? It's not to burn calories, it's to get fit. It's to improve cardiovascular respiratory fitness. So none of those activities, we've really talked about burning calories. Are you burning calories? Yes, but that's not the point of those activities. Those are points, points of those tables to get your body in better shape. And the diet is for losing fat or putting on muscle. And so that's the way I have to basically sell it to them to try to get them out of that mentality that, OK, I just did 600 calories on the treadmill. I can go have three beers because that's exactly what they're doing. Now, I'm being a good client. That's actually a really good question. I have this talk with my clients, muscle nurse clients quite often. The first thing you need to do is a find the right coach, find a coach who can work with you and find somebody who's actually coaching you. That whole online training. Now you get people that are selling online training for $50 a month. You're not getting trained. You're not getting coached. You're getting a bullshit stock standard template that everybody else is getting with no actual coaching. That's why when I see people saying that they're coaching 300 people, how? How? My guys are pretty much capped off at 30 clients a piece. And that can be pushing it sometimes because a coach is going to be there to get on Zoom and talk to you, answer your emails, text you, watch videos of you training, tell you what you're doing wrong and what to do better. That's coaching. If you're going to be an online coach, it is a very time-consuming process. It's way harder and way more time consuming than training in the gym. Okay. So the first thing is find the right coach who's actually going to coach you and not just send you some bullshit. If you're going to do that, you might as well buy a book and figure it out for yourself. Right. So, or, or just be clear that I'm buying a program from you. You're not actually going to tell me what to do. Right. Now on the client side, when you find that right coach, fucking do what they fucking say. Right. Okay. Do what they say. The reason you're paying them money for coaching is to tell you what to do. If you went to a financial advisor and he goes, I recommend you don't buy a Ferrari right now. I need you to put this in these funds. And you went and bought the Ferrari and then you lost all your money. You'd be pissed. Well, what did I pay you for financial advice? Motherfucker, I told you not to buy that car. I told you to take this and put it in this. Or, you know, don't put it in this. Don't put your money in these e-currencies. put it in this. I put it in Bitcoin. Oh, fuck. I just lost $2 million. Oh, fuck. And now you're mad at the person who told you to do this, but you did the exact opposite thing. So one of the hurdles we go through with coaches, especially online or in person, is that if I tell you to do something and you can't actually do it, you need to tell me you can't do it so that we can work together to find a way to give you some type of momentum. And then we'll layer on top of that. So if I tell you, I want you to train six days a week, twice a day for two hours a session, and you can't do that, well, that's not a great program for you. If you only have three hours a week, you can train. We can work with that. But if you don't tell me that, we're just going to get frustrated because you're not actually following the recipe. So that's the big thing. communication is everything with this, right? Be honest with what you can actually do and don't let your ambitions override your abilities or your time. So be clear on your goals, follow the program, do not fuck with the recipe, okay? Don't add anything, don't subtract anything and if you want to, get it cleared through your coach first because you might throw a supplement in there that then is contraindicated with something else a medication you on or another supplement that you been put on If you already at pretty low calories and you decide you going to go out for a couple of two hikes now you got relative energy deficiency Now you lose your period and your hair's falling out and you don't know why you can't sleep. Well, you fucked with the recipe and I wasn't told and I didn't approve that. Those are the big things. And just be consistent. We use chronometer for nutritional tracking. If you call me and you complain that you're gaining weight, not losing weight. And I open up your chronometer and I don't see the days like this. And they're like this all over the place. And I see that you're missing workouts or you're not training hard. We're going to have a big talk and it's not going to be a very nice talk because you're not, you can't come to your coach and complain because you're not doing what you need to do on your end. We can't lift for you. We can't sleep for you. We can't rest for you. We can't cook and eat for you. We can't do any of this stuff for you. Our job as a coach is to tell you what to do make sure we we look at your data we assess everything we create a plan we tell you what to do with the plan and then we watch and observe what you're doing and we make constant assessments and adjustments that's our part of the bargain your part of the bargain is to take the information and do the fucking work right yeah no i think i think you've hit the nail on the head there it was interesting that you've mentioned about the communication thing that is the hardest part for a lot of people is because they've had so much bullshit in the past potentially they're coming from weird backgrounds they're coming from fad diets and then they feel that if the relationship isn't there or else they've had a bad day that they're just going to puncture the rest of the tires in their car and then they won't be able to move and they won't be able to do anything or like no no that's the day you need to check in that's the week you need to talk more so than the week you've had the good weeks because it's not going to be like tut tut when you're down or whatever it may be it has to be an open dialogue and that's the hardest part for people because they've been shamed for so long for potentially looking a certain way and now they they're at their lowest point now it's the it can be the tough love approach but it also can be the nicey-nicey approach where it's needed um you talk about the supplements and the bullshit supplements and one of the supplements that's out there is the bcaas is it worth the money or not not look i'm i'll say this i don't they're not worthless but they're probably for most people a waste of money. There are specific situations where they might be okay. Like I will use them when I do jujitsu competitions. I may have to weigh in multiple times a day. So I need something that can feed me energy without having a high volume. So in that case, I might use some BCAAs. That's like the only time I ever take them is in between matches with some honey or Gatorade or electrolytes, something where I don't have a high volume of weight. So I can make sure that I can, when I get back on the scale that I don't disqualify myself for the next round of grappling. So there's things like that that's useful, but realistically, if you're, if you're eating enough meat and especially if you're, well, if you're eating a protein, especially meat, you're probably getting plenty of BCAAs. If you're using whey protein, you're probably getting plenty. If you're a vegan or vegetarian and you're using a vegan or vegetarian protein, most of those are reinforced. You don't need to layer BCAAs on top of that. And one of the big issues we see with the BCAAs is that we get, this is so weird to me, we get, and again, it's women. We like to pick on women because they do some weird shit. At least men do dumb shit that gets themselves killed. Women just do dumb stuff that delays their progress. That's the biggest difference and that's why women live longer than men because we're stupid um so we get a lot of women that they go i don't like water so i drink bcaa powder it's like okay you don't like the taste of water no it doesn't taste like anything it tastes like nothing i don't like it i need flavored water i'm like all right so why don't we use like crystal light not aspartame David Avocado Wolf said that's going to kill me. And I'm like, cool. Well, how many, how many scoops of BCAAs are you doing at a 10, 10 scoops, five grams of BCAAs. You're drinking like 200, 300 extra grams or extra calories a day. No, no, no. The label says there's no calories in it. Okay. Let's have a talk about labeling laws. They don't have to put the calories from single amino acids is that you're drinking two or 300 calories that we don't earn accounted for. And that's why you're not losing weight. Um, so you've got that aspect. There's some other aspects, some literature talking about large neutral amino acids, amino acids will compete for each other through amino acid transports. And so the, the concentration that's highest for the amino acids, that's the one that's going to have the most chance of getting through. So if you're eating a lot of large amino acids like leucine and cranking BCAAs there a good chance you going to have a hard time getting tryptophan and tyrosine into the brain and that can screw up your neurotransmitters. So it can make you apathetic. It can make you crave carbs, trying to get more tryptophan in the brain. It can screw up your serotonin, your melatonin, your dopamine. So there's a lot of things there that people don't think about. And when I was with the other company I used to work for. They were big on, you know, 45, 60 grams of BCAAs every day when you trained. What I came to found out after a few years of watching people is about two to two and a half months after they did that, their personality would get super flat. And I would be always like, when did you lose your personality? Two and a half months ago. When did you start taking 50, 60 grams of bca's every day oh shit about two and a half months ago and that's what i thought give them some stuff to boost up neurotransmitters they feel good again it's like get rid of the bca's you don't need them they're expensive it's easier just to do whey protein or just eat real food yeah and i love that i love that note the known answer approach and the kind of the research behind that as well um one of the big things that kind of happens with the diet is the whole thing of the order nothing approach um and you put up a post i think it was muscle nerds put up a post about kind of a little less of what's holding you back a little more of what's actually moving you forward i thought that was a beautiful sentiment and an incredible sentence can you kind of go into that a little bit more in detail please yeah look um people people are gung-ho at first they're gung-ho you set somebody down at your table you say okay i see what you want to do cool how fast you want this i want it fast all right what are you willing to do i'm willing to do everything. And that lasts five days and they're already fucking up. It's like, okay, if people would take a more moderate approach at first, um, and I'm talking usually mostly gen pop, just build some momentum, like just get used to eating enough and then having a small deficit and nailing your training. There's enough shit for you to manage without trying to go to extreme and having extreme lethargy, um, not wanting to train being apathetic because you don't have any energy hurting all the time because you can't recover it's not sleeping well your dick stops working your vagina stops working like all this shit happens because you don't have enough energy to basically run these systems your body will when you go full stop and you're burning through a lot of energy and you're burning through a lot of co-factors meaning things like vitamins and minerals when you burn through that with a lot of training and you're not putting it back in your body is going to take whatever you have left over and use it for short-term needs which means staying alive so it's going to partition all that stuff to what do i need to make my brain work my heart work my liver work and all that stuff um and things like having a nice rock hard boner throw it out the window having a period throw out the window pretty hair skin and nails throw it out the window so the body is very good at moving things to the emergency stash and moving away from things that we really need to enjoy life. So most people don't have the mental fortitude either to just jump into it, right? So there's many different ways to get there. Some ways are faster than others, but you have to be, in order to do it really fast, you have to be in the right mental space. So for a lot of people, in my experience, the first thing is let's take it pretty easy the first six to eight weeks, and let's just build some good patterns, good habits, Turn those habits into rituals. Learn how food works. Get good nutritional literacy. Learn how training works. Get your sleep right. Get your poop right. Get your brain right. Let's get all this stuff ready. And then if you want to make it faster, cool. We'll drop the hammer at that point because now you know what to expect. Right. And then we can drop the hammer for a while. Then we can pull back. Drop the hammer for a while. Pull back. But a lot of people just want to mash the gas pedal. They want to cut the brake lines and mash the gas pedal. And then they take their hands off. They go, Jesus, take the wheel. Shit. and then the car goes right off the road so yeah that's a brilliant analogy to free wheeling down with no brakes yeah i think you spoke there about um the whole aspect of kind of digestion and kind of like the poop side of things but one of the things that's kind of most underrated exercise that most people are doing it is a masturbation it's mastication so people need to listen to that sentence again can you talk about the importance of kind of the importance solve mastication too. And because it is one of those things that I think we're all guilty of at some point. I'm still guilty of it. Like we do get it wrong as well ourselves. Yeah. You know, I think it's funny because again, old companies to work for supplement company at love pushing five, 600 pills on people a day. And I got caught up into that. I'm like, all right, cool. You got gut issues We just going to throw every fucking supplement on it Right And now later on I realized man if people would just sit down and calm down and enjoy their meal and chew their food like a fucking adult most people gut problems magically go away So, you know, it's like sitting down, be social, eat slowly. If you do that, you manage your hunger. If you chew your food appropriately, great. I'm going to absorb more of my food and I make it less hard for my system to have to process. the the thing that people need to understand about digestion is kind of the main purpose or the main the main ongoing theme with digestion is surface area right so you have massive surface area in your intestines um and you want to try to chew your chew your food until it's in as small a piece possible the more the more work your mouth gets accomplished the easier it is on the stomach Like that makes it easier on the small intestine, easier on the large intestine. Right. So if people would chew your food until it's in a semi-liquid state, I think it's like old Chinese proverb or some Confucius shit or something like chew your water and drink your food or some shit like that. I don't know if that's true. Somebody said that to me once, but it's kind of stupid to chew your water. But if people would just like men, here's where I'm going to pick on men. men and you've seen this you sit around with a steak a dude will take a 500 gram rump and see if he can eat that in three bites yeah right and that you know and then goes i don't know why i'm so full and my stomach's wrecked and why i'm so constipated well you just create a situation where you're you need more gastric juices to try to break that down so it's just going to sit in your stomach like a fucking brick all night right um trainers are the worst at it too because trainers, at least old school trainers that like the work, they'll pile 10 people back to back to back to back. They'll say, oh, go warm up on the treadmill. I'll be right back. They'll run into the break room. They'll make a shake or they'll throw something in the microwave and they'll unhinge their jaw and they'll just throw it all down and they won't chew it at all. And then when they come to me for a consult, I'll go, okay, well, let me look at your schedule. When do you actually have time to eat because I see you got like fucking 10 people in a row. Oh, I eat between clients. No, no, no, no, no. We don't do that anymore. Who's in control of your schedule? I am at least put 15 minutes between some of these clients, your client. There's no rule that says your client has to come in at 5. Your client's okay to come in at 5.15, give yourself 15 minutes to go calm down, enjoy your food and chew it. And I guarantee you all your digestive issues go away without any fucking pills and probably nine times out of ten that's the case and like oh the power of chewing it doesn't even cost me anything yeah it's too good to be true almost yeah um the one thing that you'd remove from the fitness industry luke one thing i would remove social media really 100 i fucking hate it i fucking hate it um it's it's why our social media is not great at all like if people have that much time to boost up their social media, what the fuck are they doing the rest of the day? Who are you training? Like what work are you actually doing? If you're making, you get guys who are video, video, video. They're no longer trainers. They're not trainers. They're just content creators, right? Because that's all they're doing. You know, I'd love to have time to sit down and do some videos and shit, but I'm too busy training clients online, training clients in person, research and development for courses, answering emails, doing mentorships, doing consults. trying to knock in some type of training for myself. Like when, when the hell do people have time to actually work except for create content? So, you know, a lot of the guys with the huge reaches and, and, you know, you see guys with a million people or hundreds of thousands of followers, they're not doing any actual real work anymore. They're just making videos. And most of those videos is they watch somebody else's video on YouTube. They take their notes, they make their own video, they make it look better. And now they're an expert. So that's, that's something that just drives me insane is social media. Anybody can look like an expert. You don't have to have expertise anymore. Like I come from an age where I got in the industry 20 years ago. You had to fucking prove yourself. You had to get good results. You had to go out and meet people. You had to meet the right, you had to get the right mentors. You had to show that you actually could get results. You couldn't just pretend like you're an expert and everybody believes it. I think, yeah, I can understand that. I think that a lot of people just want to, Because even now, if you talk to, say, kids or teenagers, what do you want to be when you're older? Like, I want to be an influencer. That wasn't the thing. I heard that somewhere recently. That's the worst. And there are some good guys out there making really good content. And they've been in the industry for a while and they've got a portfolio. But I know a lot of guys that haven't trained anybody. They've not trained a single fucking person. I know people who are doing online training that have never actually trained someone in person. How the fuck?

Do you do that? I don't understand that. Yeah. But you wouldn't be able to put up your daily memes if you didn't have social media. Well, that's different. I think personal, you said out of the industry, my personal account, anybody listening, don't fucking send me muscle nerds related questions on my page. That is for me to post memes while I'm taking a shit. So whenever you see like five or six memes pop up, just understand that at that moment, I'm dropping a turd right so get that in your mind that's fantastic I might have to you know with that with that image uh Luke where can people find out about the the education portal where can people work with yourself uh through the website all right so obviously I hate social media but muscle nerds underscore health if you like memes and you're not going to get offended um good then you can come to my my social media account Luke Lehman on Instagram we've got muscle MuscleNerds.net. No one ever goes to web pages anymore So MuscleNerds We a IOPC which is our gem in Brisbane We got that one Yeah I mean that pretty much the big ones We don't do Twitter. We don't do Tik TOK and we don't do any of the other shit. I may do an only fans thing. I don't know. Yeah. There's your next news. I do an only fans thing. And Zoe could just like record me while I'm doing memes, taking a shit. and we'll see if anybody wants to pay for that. I'd say a lot of people would, unfortunately. I mean, I heard of a lady who's making $4,000 a month on TikTok or on OnlyFans and all she does is video herself farting. I heard about that lady. Well, dude, I can do that all fucking day. No problem. You're missing out. There's the revenue. If you ever stuck for money one month, there you go. That's it. That's it, man. That's some weird-ass fetish shit. Exactly. Luke I cannot thank you enough for your time and I'm absolutely honoured and humbled to have you on so thank you so much for having the chat yeah for sure thanks for having me on