Why Least Mode NOT Beast Mode is the Key to Long-term Health with Luke Leaman

# Why Least Mode NOT Beast Mode is the Key to Long-term Health with Luke Leaman

**Channel:** The Smart Nutrition Made Simple Show
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/defc5914-15f7-4dba-bd83-7da6a9598aca/luke-leaman-podcast.mp3

Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to episode number 25 of the Smart Nutrition Made Simple Show. I'm your host, Ben Brown, and today we dive in with my buddy Luke Lehman, the co-founder of MuscleNerds.tv with his lovely bride, Zoe. and Muscle Nerds is a online and personal training development business that helps teach coaches the tools that they need to realistically implement with their clients to get long-term, realistic, and effective results without further beating them into the ground. You know, it's the goal with Muscle Nerds and with what it is that Luke and Isaac teach over there to attract like-minded coaches and individuals and coaches that just care, plain and simple. They help create critical thinking coaches and try not to conform to any dogmatic beliefs and really pride themselves on spreading the message and the importance of education, knowledge, and understanding and awareness that every client should be treated as an individual and that factors outside of just diet and exercise should be considered and oftentimes addressed. In this interview, Luke and I chop it up about stress management, about dogmatic beliefs in the fitness industry. We talk about how his definition of health has changed over the years through his journey through powerlifting to traditional strength training to now implementing more facets of aerobic-based training. and how his training with some of the biggest and brightest coaches in the industry has helped not only develop his current perspective of what it takes to not only be a good coach, but help get people good results, but also what are the things that need to be avoided in the industry. So I think you guys are going to enjoy this interview. Luke is highly respected in the strength and conditioning field. Like I said, he has a wealth of knowledge and years and years of experience. And having personally taken his classes, I know that you're going to find a lot of value in them. Assuming you do and assuming you like the information that we're putting out here on the Smart Nutrition Made Simple show, then we would love for you to subscribe to the show and leave us a five-star review, as well as hopefully you can find a couple, you know, one or two ahas within this episode. And if you think that there's anything in here that any of your friends or family or loved ones can resonate with, then please share it with them. With that said, I will turn it over to Luke Lehman. Enjoy. Luke Lehman, what's up, my man? Not a whole lot, Ben. What's going on? Nothing, nothing. Everything's good. How's life been with you? it is uh hectic as always so non-stop yeah you got you guys you've been all over the place for the last few years with your new business muscle nerds tell me a little bit about muscle nerds what exactly are you guys doing with your business who do you serve what's your mission what does that look like man you know that's been that's such a hard thing to answer because we do so much stuff. So when I left my last job as an educator that I did for three years full-time and for a long time, part-time, you know, I had, I kind of went into the industry and said, where, what does the industry need? Like, what is, what are people not doing? And what I, what I saw is like, people aren't, aren't catering to general population. So there's, there was no one educating about how to just train your next door neighbor. Right. And so Whenever I was teaching for that, the other company, I would always ask the coaches that came through. I said, listen, how many of you guys actually train athletes? Because I was in a position where I was teaching people how to train pro and Olympic athletes. And, you know, you get one or two people in a class of 40 or 50 people. And I said, how many of you guys just, you know, just train Susie Muffintop? And everyone would raise their hands. And I'm going and I'm thinking, why are you guys at hypertrophy boot camps? And why are you doing all these extreme, like how to train the, you know, pro rugby player, but you don't actually train any of them. You guys are training just normal people. So this stuff doesn't really work that well for those people unless they're incredibly motivated and incredibly healthy, you know? And so I've been in this industry for over 20 years and, you know, I've seen things come, I've seen things go. And part of the problem with what I do or what I done in the past with training was I was a physique coach and you know you just see a lot of people get really bashed up by poor training methods and trying to push too hard and dieting too hard and throwing all the drugs in and things like that. So I'm like, man, the industry is really, really far one direction. Somebody's got to bring this shit back to balance. So we decided what we're going to do is we're going to do the opposite of what everybody else is doing. And we're going to teach people how to train normal people and how to assess them, how to manage it, and mainly just revolving around things like stress. The majority of people that come into train, they come into train with you because they don't feel good about themselves anymore. They're out of shape, they're sick, they're tired, they're overweight, they're inflamed, and they have a poor quality of life and they know that. And they're not coming in, the majority of the industry is not coming in to train with you because they want six pack abs. Most people just want to be unfat. And those are two completely different concepts. Some of the underlying physiology is the same, but it's the extremism that we're kind of against nowadays. Yeah. So you guys are addressing some of the lesser talked about issues that are really main drivers of the problem at hand, of the problem behind why people are getting fat and sick and fatigued and all of those types of issues. So how do you address those issues that's different than what the industry is doing? How do you address stress? How do you assess it, you know, address it and help people manage it? You know, we'll just start with stress. How do you help people manage it more effectively? Yeah, well, look, the first thing is you have to admit that there's a problem. You know, it's just like anything else. And a lot of your clients will come to you and they'll say, you'll say, hey, Ben, how stressed are you? Well, I don't feel very stressed, Luke. And you say, well, OK, let's talk about it. And what I find is that coaches don't spend enough time actually talking to their clients. They're too busy doing, using special programs and calipers and doing all this other stuff that the clients hate instead of sitting them down and going, let's get to the root of what's actually happening. And let's find out if I'm qualified to even help you or if we need to bring somebody else in. Because what I've learned is there's a ton of psychological things that people are going through. There's a ton of like really messed up childhood trauma that you're just not able to deal with. there's a lot of things you're doing with work and relationships and things that a personal trainer can't fix with sets, reps and time under tension. So we have to start, we have to start admitting that there's some, some other things going on that we have to address. So the God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. You ask questions and you let your client tell you what the problem is. And the only way you're going to do that is if you sit down, talk to them and actually give a shit. And that's what a lot of people don't care about anymore. That the industry has gotten too much about money and nobody actually cares. And I think it's, it's, you know, the, the, you know, the kind of my past life and where I came from, there's no empathy, especially with male trainers. Male trainers have a really hard time with, with empathy and actually like understanding what your client's going through. And if you want your client to give it their all, if you want them to stop self-sabotaging, if you want them to learn how to eat correctly, you have to sit down and find out what's actually going on or you can't really move forward. and you'll get really good success with 30 or 40% of your clients. But what about the 50, 60, 70% that you're not doing anything for? And when, when you're trying to do everything right, but they're self-sabotaging, when you're trying to do everything right and nothing works, you know, when, when, when they're lying about what they're eating, or sometimes they're not even lying, they're just not losing weight and they're eating the way you tell them to, there's underlying physiology where something's just not, not clicking inside of them. And so that's kind of what we talk to our guys about. We talk about a lengthy interviewing session, like sit down and find out what the problem is. This is the questions you need to ask and find out about their sleep, find out how they're pooping, you know, let them understand what a proper poop is. Most clients don't know even what they're supposed to be doing. They don't understand that four or five hours a night is not adequate. And they also think that just because they're in bed unconscious that they're asleep. And that's not the case. You have to be getting good restful sleep. They need to understand that a peanut is not a quality protein. They need to understand, you know, there's a lot of stuff they need to understand. And, you know, we have to get trainers to the point where they understand that they're not just a personal trainer, but they're also a mentor and a teacher. And part of their job is teaching their clients how to change their lifestyle. You know, I have a lot of appreciation for that perspective, which has taken both me and you, I know, years and years to establish and appreciate. Because, you know, one of the things about empathy is, I feel like to a degree, it has to be experiential. And we have to go through all of these stages in our life and our career with our own personal struggles to be able to understand what our clients are going through. And that's seemingly a very difficult aspect of training the trainer, because you have so many trainers that are so young and full of testosterone and and you know want to just hit the gym and eat clean and not understanding the implications of stress and lack of sleep and family and lifestyle and they have no responsibilities and all of these things. But genuinely, when we can sit down and listen to our clients and then, you know, empathize with where they're coming from, understand with where they're coming from, and then provide experiential feedback, it's extremely, extremely valuable. So, you know, I appreciate you sharing that. What do you think are the tools that are going to be necessary to help trainers, you know, better start to instill those, you know, those necessary components into their coaching? That's a good question. So it's awesome now that we're in this awesome technological age where everyone has a, an iPhone or an Android phone or a Google phone or whatever, some type of smartphone. And part of it's really bad because the things always strap to people's faces. But if we can get them to understand that you got to get off the phone and get off the computer and actually experience life again, which we've gotten away from, and then you also have to teach them cool things that you can do with a phone that will help move them forward. Because there's a lot of things that you can use to measure that stress response. One thing that we'll use, we like to use waking heart rate and like these waking heart rate variability. So what we'll typically use as a standard is, we want someone to be in shape and have a low 50s on their waking heart rate. Meaning that most of the guys that we deal with, like I deal with a lot of guys that are coaches. Like, so for me, I only really train coaches now. Now I have trainers underneath me that they do train general population, but we do probably 80% of our clientele is other coaches and they come to us and man, they're just messed up. They're waking up and they've got an 85 to 90 beats per minute waking up. And what does that mean? Like, why is it good to have in the 50s and why would it seemingly be bad to be up in the 80s? So stress hormones create muscle heart contractions, specifically norepinephrine. So if you're waking up with a resting heart rate or waking heart rate that that's elevated, then that means your body's on a fight or flight mode and it thinks you're basically wrestling a bear while you're trying to sleep. So when people come to me and they say, yeah, I sleep okay. All right, let's measure it. So they wake up and they've got 90 beats per minute. You don't really sleep that well. Well, when we can, when we utilize certain training protocols and get their, their metabolism balanced and get their, their physiology balanced, they start waking up and they're, they're in the sixties or the high fifties and they feel amazing. They're like, wow, I've been sleeping like that for 20 years and I didn't even know that that's not okay. you know that you ask him how well do you sleep well I wake up a couple of times use the bathroom that's not normal that's common but that's not normal and they think that well I've always done that you know yeah and it's not normal it's a it's a stress response causing you to have to get up and use the bathroom yeah it's it's funny that you bring that up because I've just I've just recently actually since I took your course I've been I've been using you know that the sleep cycle app on the phone. So on the iPhones, it has a sleep cycle app and you put it in airplane mode, but it uses the speakers to kind of listen for movement and noise and stuff like that. So it tracks the times when, and I don't know how accurate it is, but what it also does is, so it tracks deep sleep and what's seemingly REM sleep and then the lighter stages of sleep. And we should be going in and out of these right throughout the night. But when you wake up first thing in the morning before getting out of bed, it does like a pulse heart rate. And so like three nights ago I did it and I was at, you know, like 58. And then it's, it was Halloween here in the States. So it was Halloween, you know, two nights ago. And one of my kids was up all night. She ate way too much candy and it was a nightmare. And, And, but I point is that I was like wound up. She was up all night, like, you know, back to sleep, then up. And my stress hormones were super high. Whatever little sleep I got, woke up in the morning, tested the heart rate. It was like 78. And it's just a perfect representation of, because I have nights like that when I can't shut off the brain and, you know, we're thinking about work or we're thinking about, you know, something's always distracting us and keeping our stress hormones really high. And so it's a really good example of how we're always wound up in this, you know, sympathetic nervous system state. Yeah. And that's the thing. And it's it's it's hell to get out of it, you know, and you have to be really diligent about it. But what's cool about using apps like that is it makes you cognizant that there's an issue and it also makes you cognizant of how certain things affect you. So we'll have people do the heart rate and also the heart rate variability. and they'll, even though a lot of the clients don't know what that means, we give them some parameters and they say okay I realize when I have this meal this is a meal I usually eat once a week And when I have that meal I wake up and I got a high resting heart or high waking heart rate and a low heart rate variability So they understand yeah I also didn sleep well last night. So it makes them more compliant. And ultimately the main factor of getting success with your client is making them very compliant and very consistent for a very long time. Right. So, and it's good to have metrics that they can, you know, for me, metrics are really big deal because I'm, I'm a very competitive person and I'm a, I used to be a video gamer. So when I want to set a goal, I'll set a metric and I'll work really hard and I get, it's probably not good because I get a little bit obsessive about it, but it keeps me on track. So then, yeah, so it helps establish more compliance. It helps establish more awareness around what they're doing because then they understand like, Hey, I had two glasses of wine with dinner and I guess I slept like shit because my heart rate in the morning is really high. And then they can start to track those things and understand those correlational relationships and everything like that. So what would you expect to see when you say first start working with a client with their heart rate and heart rate variability? What should people be looking for with something like that over time? So what we typically look for is like we said, like somewhere in the fifties for the heart rate is pretty good. As long as it's there in the fifties and it's there well-trained, uh, some people will come to you and there's going to be some issues. I was, did a consult with a girl today that's gone through a very stressful few years. She has a heart rate of 46, but it's a heart rate of 46 because her thyroid is not working correctly anymore. She's got hypothyroidism. She's got some adrenal issues and things that we're working through. And the main thing to do for that is we've got to teach her better stress management. So we have to get tactics and more routine and then also change her perception of how that stress bothers her. So instead of allowing certain stressors, like something I usually tell people is like, you have, you have a kid, so you'll understand this, right? So if you, if, if I have you write down all the stressors that you deal with every day and I say, okay, some of these stressors you're going to be able to get rid of. Some of them, you have to learn how to manage your reaction to those. Like if you, if, if, if your kid was a common stressor, it would probably not be very feasible for you to sell her to gypsies because that would be really frowned upon. But what we can do is give you more tactics on how do I control my response when my kid's up all night with a tummy ache because she ate too much candy or whatever the, whatever the thing is. if you've got a car that's beat up and it's causing you problems and you can, that's something you can get rid of. So you have to learn, what do I have? What can I get rid of and what can I manage? And then how do I learn how to manage that stuff better? Right. And a lot of cases too, people are just training too hard. You get a guy, a CEO, CFO of a company, CO, whatever, they come in their executive, they're working 16, 18 hours a day. Like their entire life revolves around work. And then they come into you and you say, okay, we're going to put you on a 12 week transformation and then I'm just going to beat your dick in the dirt. And that's the last thing that that client really needs. What that client really needs is to balance out their metabolism. Um, because a lot of their energy systems are going to be going the wrong way. So for instance, if you, you have high resting heart rate, or let's say you wake up, if you woke up, uh, tomorrow, you wake up tomorrow and you have 85 beats per minute, I can guarantee you when you go to squat a 12 rep match, your legs are going to be on fire between three to four or five reps because you have put yourself in a position where you've ramped the glycolysis up too much, which is not normal. And you're not actually going to be able to oxidize fats and carbohydrates properly like you're supposed to. So when you start driving those energy systems out of the way, that's part of that calories in versus calories at equation. You know, that is your, your, how many calories are you making from the food? How many calories are you making from, or how much ATP and how much energy are you making from that stored glycogen? And if you're turning through in proper, really inefficient pathways, you're not making a whole lot. So you're going to be very, very fatigued, and that's going to lower the amount of calories you're actually burning through, if that makes sense. No, that makes good sense, and that's a good point. And the hard part about that is, especially when you get those types of clients, usually they're coming in and saying, usually they're type A people and they're coming in and saying, I need a diet and I need to have you kick my ass for four or five days a week so that I can get to said goal. And that comes back to part of actually listening to what's going on in their life. What sort of stressors and amount are they dealing with? And then you telling them, you know, what it is that they need. No, actually, that may be what you think you need. But what you actually need is to chill the heck out and, you know,

maybe start with establishing a broader aerobic base and doing some more, you know, less strength training and more stress management or more mindfulness or more guided meditation and stuff like that. So, you know, some of the things that we talked about in your muscle nerds course was actually how to effectively utilize cardiovascular training and resistance training and how to marry those two for people like this. Could you talk a little bit about, you know, because there's a stigma in the industry, especially from the direction that you and I come from of heavy resistance training for fat loss purposes, for athletic population purposes. There's a, at least for explosive type sports, there's a stigma around cardiovascular exercise, period. And you have, you know, completely shifted that, you know, that perception to suggest that aerobic training actually can be very beneficial at various stages. So would you please elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. And this is, I mean, it is a huge misconception because, you know, people say, why don't you want to do aerobics? Oh, it makes you slow. It makes you fat. It makes you all the cortisol, the cortisol and all this stuff. And it's all a load of bollocks. The fact of the matter is, you know, I really love something that Zoe said to me once. And she goes, we were talking about some energy systems and she was like, well, if you look at it like this, aerobics are the energy system of life. You know, that's actually that's actually true because it's what runs everything and keeps you alive. So why would you not want to make that as really hardcore as possible? Like, and the thing is with our industry, everything is so extreme. So if you say, okay, I'm going to start doing some aerobic training, everyone starts saying, oh, you know, aerobic training is going to ruin your physique. It's going to make you weak. Well, I'm not talking about going and running a hundred kilometers a week. It's, you're not going to get weaker running a couple of five Ks, right? We're doing, we're getting on the treadmill and walking on an incline for an hour. It's just not going to happen. Um, and it just shows that people don't understand the underlying physiology of how you actually recycle things in your body and what the aerobics actually does. And the person that got me into that, the first guy to get me into it was Joel Jameson. And he's the one that got me into like, wow, okay. So he's saying that the aerobic system is what buffers the other systems. And if you want better sport performance, especially in things, he trains guys in MMA. And, you know, he talks about how everything kind of comes full circle. So if you want power endurance, if you want to be able to keep punching people really hard over and over and over, if you don't have enough of an aerobic base, you're going to gas out because you can't, you cannot recycle some of those energy substrates. So I started looking at that and saying, well, how do we look at this towards the general population? And what we found was that most of them are already in lactic kind of pathways because they're all so stressed out. Those stress hormones, you're going to, when you increase that fight or flight, you need fast energy. Where do you get fast energy? You get fast energy through glycolysis. So we found was all of these people, the higher their heart rate was waking, the worse their lactate threshold was. And they just didn't have a very good engine. So I started adapting stuff from Joel Jameson and said, okay, so we're going to start with doing some cardiac output works and aerobic work. Why don't we do that at the front of the program instead of the rear? Because in the physique world, you basically don't do any aerobics till the end. Well, why don't we put them in the front and really set your body up by encouraging mitochondrial growth, mitochondrial efficiency, learning how to get oxygen. And if you want to oxidize fats and carbs, you need oxygen. The more stressed out you are, the more you shallow breathe, which means you're not actually getting the majority of enough oxygen in to run these things. And so what we found as we started using it with people a couple of years ago, we were like, wow, this really works really well. Like they're actually losing a ton of fat the first six to eight weeks. Plus you get a guy that could barely, he could barely walk for 30 minutes. Now he's running for an hour and he's having to run just to get his heart rate up. Yeah. He's ready to do hard training because he's put himself in a good position. He's recovering well. He's, um, he's recycling energy substrates really well. He's, he's, you know, eating a lot more because his mitochondria are burning a lot more faster. So we've effectively increased his, his calories out. Um, and we've, we've pumped in more food as he's gotten leaner. So, um, they're getting plenty of food, plenty of calories in, plenty of calories out. everything's working really well. Now they're set up to the point where now we can go all beast mode on them, but we have to lease mode before we beast mode. So we get them that up and prep them to get ready to do a really hard training cycle. You know, the majority of people, if, if you walk into most gems and you walk up to a meathead trainer he going to go all right let go He not going to do hardly any assessments He just going to start writing some crazy 30 or 40 set protocol for the hour and just bashing you into the floor And that's probably not what you need. It's not what you need yet. That's something you need to earn. So talk a little bit more about your least mode philosophy and what's kind of like a realistic progression in terms of, okay, let's say they start with establishing aerobic base, how many days a week, how many days a week should they be doing resistance training? And what sort of volume are we looking at for the, you know, the, yeah, the average stressed out, out of shape person. You know, first it depends on how much time they have to a lot, but I would say that the majority of people that we get that are in that type of situation, we'll have them. It's not really how many days of lifting it's total time over the week. So, you know, most people want to train three or four days with weights. So that's okay. But let's just, let's just spread it out 30 minute sessions, four days a week. And then as far as the, um, as far as the aerobic training, because the intensity is so low, the only problem with aerobic training is you have to do a lot of volume to really get a really good effect. So what I'll typically do is I'll load up a lot of aerobic work and I use the parameters that Joel Jamison uses, um, in what he teaches, which is, um, anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes a day, and we'll put them at 130 to 150 beats per minute. They can't be making any lactate. If they're at 140, 150 and their legs are burning or on fire, we'll back them off a little bit. What we're doing is we want a long time in those zones. You could do two 30-minute sessions a day if you wanted to. It doesn't have to be all at once. They recommend a minimum of 30 minutes though, because what we're doing is we're trying to build a cardiovascular cardiovascular system. If you build a cardiovascular system and make it more efficient, that effectively turns off some of those stress hormones because your heart doesn't have to work as much to get as much blood pushed through you. So we'll do a lot of aerobics at first. We'll do, uh, most of the weight training we do will be stretching type of movements, like weighted mobility, because most of the people that come to us, what do they do all day? They sit in the chair, they sit and they drive everything's everything's in front of them, their keyboard, their steering wheel. They don't do anything for the back. So we use a lot of stretching movements to get them back in order and a lot of structural balance type stuff. In our experience, if I have someone that comes in and they have a really high waking heart rate and they're really stressed out, it takes about five to six weeks to go from an 85 beats per minute to a low 60s. So it's very fast. And the nice thing about it is you do one really good concentrated block, your aerobic training doesn't drop off that much. There's only about a 2% detraining effect every week. So you could do that block every, you know, eight months, you know, and that's all you would have to do. Then you could go back to all your, your beasting workouts and all that stuff. I think that's cool because there seems like such a big barrier to entry for so many people is the perception that I know I need to get in shape. I know I'm, I'm too stressed out. I'm not making time to exercise, but I just am so fearful of actually having to go into the gym, having to go get uncomfortable lifting weights, having to train at this extremely high intensity that I think I need to be training at and to help people understand that, no, man, you know, look, could you commit at least 30 minutes a day? And just what if it's just walking on the treadmill at a slight incline? It really lowers the bar, you know, so much there. So with that said, what sort of benefits do people experience, you know, over that, say, course of four to six to eight weeks of initial training? How do they feel? What sort of changes can people expect? Well, one of the things, the majority of people that come to us are super stressed out and inflamed. So the minute they start dropping that stress and inflammation, they lose a ton of water weight, right? So right off the bat, they're losing weight, which is, you know, regardless of what we think about weight loss versus fat loss, that's a huge intrinsic motivator. When you see that scale make that big drop it's pretty exciting and when you drop that you you're not going to have your blood pressure is going to drop obviously because you're not going to have that blood volume um you start sleeping better you start pooping better right and then you generally feel better and if you feel better you're more you're more apt to be compliant on the programming and then you know this and then you know when when people coming in we don't give them like really hardcore, really hardcore, stringent instructions at first. We find, you know, at what level can you work? And we're going to work at that level. So that's one of the biggest things I got from John Berardi, precision nutrition is you got to find out where your client is. And the art of coaching is not to fit them in the box you think they should fit in. It's to fit your training and customize it. That's why we call it personal training. You want to personalize the training around what that client can actually do. And then you also want to fit it around certain types of metrics that go above and beyond what they look like you know because the industry is super focused on transformations because that what sells It good for marketing It good for a trainer ego But at the end of the day your client's going to look at you like you're a God if you get them sleeping and pooping better. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. So within those, within that kind of behavioral change model, because I really like variety stuff as well, at least used to, you know, really be, or had done a couple of his certifications, but within that behavioral change model, how do you guys implement your nutritional guidelines? How do you make that a part of the program without focusing, same ideas, without focusing on numbers and weighing and measuring and things like that? Yeah, the first thing is, you know, find out what they're willing to and not willing to eat. You know, if I've got certain things that I know probably work better in somebody's diet, but if they're not willing to eat that because they don't like seafood or they don't like beef or they have an intolerance or something like that we've got to find out what they actually will and won't do well we basically teach them three square meals a day like we three square meals a day you eat until you're satisfied and then you walk away from the table and if you're still really really hungry then eat another half meal or eat or if you're still hungry eat another full meal but these are what we want we want something that we want a ton of veggies because veggies aren't aren't really emphasized enough people emphasize protein protein protein but over the years, I've seen a lot of issues with people because of faulty protein metabolism and faulty biochemistry. So we look at things as being, you know, if you, if you look at the data, what is, you know, really the most protein you're going to be able to eat to really get muscle protein synthesis. And you're looking at like somewhere around 2.2 grams per kilogram. So it's like zealed one gram per pound of body weight. Anything above that is, is it basically going to make really expensive glycogen and really expensive energy, which is okay because that can create an artificial calorie deficit, you can trick the body, but there's also some waste products you got to deal with and things like that. But we try to teach people how to eat instinctively. And we say, look, you need to eat until you're like still kind of a little bit hungry. And then, you know, let it, let it sit for a bit and let, let CCK tell your brain that you're, you've had enough to eat. And then, you know, in a couple of two or three hours later, if you're still a little bit hungry, then go ahead and eat. You know, the problem too, is people have so much food available to them and so much, uh, like the food is so palatable. It's so highly palatable that people don't understand. It's okay to feel a little bit hungry. And some of my clients, I'll have them fast for 24 hours just so they can feel what real hungry feels like. That just, I really want you to feel that motor complex in your stomach, start to growl, you know, as it's pushing down and that's hunger so that you're not, your client doesn't go, they're saying all day i'm hungry i'm so hungry and i'm like you've eaten like 2 000 calories at 2500 calories you're not hungry you're bored you know so it's good to give them a marker of saying this is what true hunger feels like you're not hungry right now and you guys use go ahead use a lot of the precision nutrition stuff the hand the like the palm and the thumb and with a fist and all that and we just we lay it out and say i want you to have like two-thirds of your plate to be veggies one-third to be some type of lean protein and then add a couple of pieces of today and we just keep it real simple. What is your perspective on people's digestion? Because I recently did an interview with a guy named Wade Lightheart and he has a company, but they specialize in digestive enzymes and probiotics and digestive related materials. And he had been a professional bodybuilder as a vegetarian and sort of his is one of course genetic is a big component but his whole thing is like look if you are actually digesting absorbing and assimilating your nutrients and specifically your proteins effectively which most people aren't doing and i've talked about this numerous times numerous times on the show then we could probably be getting by with a lot less protein and calories in general how do you guys address digestion as it pertains to people's goals and weight loss and muscle gain and stuff like that? Man, good question. Yeah, because that's a big one too. And I have yet to find somebody who has really good guts. So, you know, when we teach, you've heard it with my digestion simulation, we teach it top down. First thing is you have to teach your client how to chew their food correctly because people just don't chew enough. So everything has to start from there. You have to have a good neuroendocrine response, a calm, parasympathetic state, rest and digest, try not to eat too emotional. If you're emotional, do some headspace, do some meditation for 10 minutes before you eat and make sure you chew your food. And then as far as like digestive enzymes and things, we know that, uh, your thyroid controls, HCL production and HCL secretion of the stomach. So that going to be the number one thing is if your food is getting in your stomach and you not secreting enough acid you not going to be able to break the food down properly So that a big one So we typically will give people uh we like thorn biogest because it has everything you need from the stomach all the way down, um, all the way through the intestine, the, at least the small intestine. So we'll give a little bit of that. So we'll have a little bit of HCL and pepsin so we can break foods down and then we can digest some of the proteins. Um, and we'll give some pancreatic enzymes, um, just to give the pancreas a little bit of rest and to unwrap that food a little bit more because that's that's one of the things you know you could be i've got guys that come in they say they're hard gainers and they eat 7 000 calories a day we get them to run a and we get them to run a food log and they're eating you know five six seven thousand calories a day and they're still skinny we give them a digestive enzyme and all of a sudden they're growing on 3 000 calories and the fact is they've got malabsorption and they're just not getting the right nutrients into the cells because of stress but i absolutely agree with them and that's probably one of the cheapest things you can give somebody that's going to make the biggest bang for the buck is giving them some type of digestive enzyme but just also being aware that if somebody has any issues in the stomach like undiagnosed ulcer if they've got an h pylori infestation anything like that you want to be very careful giving them hydrochloric acid which is going to be in something like a biogas you know if that might be the case you can you can do some natural and easy things by adding more types of vinegars and things apple cider vinegar balsamic vinegar and add stuff like that to your food because it'll act like a weak acid and help to break some of that down as well but i i 100 agree with him there yeah yeah so i want to take a step back here and i'd love to get a better idea about like what propelled you to kind of get into the industry in the first place you know what i mean what what spurred your whole interest in in health and fitness and, and how did you get to where, you know, where you are now with muscle nerds? It was a Conan, Conan, the destroyer. Totally. It was Conan. It was, it was the early eighties. Yeah. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan the destroyer. I saw him and I wanted to be Conan. So my parents thought it'd be funny and they bought me a little weight set and, you know, I put the little poster up and I did what every young boy does when he starts doing workouts. He does lots of pushups and bicep curls and then he goes and runs outside. So that's what I did. When I got to be about 10 or 11 years old, you know, I'm from Texas, so it's going to be Friday Night Lights. So we all start training really early for football. So I started training, you know, all through junior high, elementary school, junior high, and then we got to high school and I started the powerlifting team at my high school and really got full on in the powerlifting for a long time. And, you know, I started studying a lot of the guys that I looked up to in the industry over the years, Charles Staley, Charles Poliquin, Paul Sheck, and all these guys started studying them in 1992 or probably 1990 with muscle media. And then, uh, you know, TMAG online, you know, all those guys, every Friday they would have the, uh, the articles would come out and I would just sit by my computer and I just keep hitting return until it popped up. And that's kind of how I got started and really fell in love with it. And I said, man, I want to do what these guys are doing someday. So, and so I did. So in 2007, I went and did a, um, you know, did my PICP one and my first bio-sig and I met Charles and all the guys up there and I fell in love with the culture that they had at that time and, and just went full bananas on it after that. And here I am. And like you said, like you said earlier about being empathetic, like the best trainers become empathetic because they go through all this stuff. So, you know, over the years I've done bad things and good things and I've hurt myself and I've fixed myself and I've gone kind of through the gamut of being shredded and then fattening up and shredded and fattening up. So, So it's just experience under the bar and experience. Doing things that allows you to be a good coach because you know what your client's going through. You're like, yeah, I've seen that before and I've felt that before and this is how you fix it. Yeah, so along that vein, is there any experiences or anything that you've personally struggled with, with your health that's made you exceptionally good at what it is that you do? oh um i don't know and i guess i guess you know over the last five years i've been living out of a suitcase traveling the world and i've gone from you know you know it's it gets lonely out there and it's uh it gets really hard because it's it's you can't always cook for yourself and it's it's hard to find good foods in certain countries it's hard to find gems sometimes and you know uh i basically used four or five years of just a bunch of excuses and so i've had to learn over the last four or five years, how to do, like, I got really hard out into the gymnastics training with the coach Sommer over gymnastic bodies. And I did my animal flow one or two certification. And I've done like all this stuff where like, okay, if I can't find a gym, how do I train? And so that's kind of where I'm at now. Um, I'm doing CrossFit right now just to find out how they do things. Right. And, you know, it's just, it's trial or error of being

convenience and not able to find something and be able to make a, I've been able to make really easy excuses and say, well, I can't find any, so I'll just go to the pub and get drunk, you know, that type of thing. So, or, you know, I'll just go over here and get some fish and chips or I'll go get a pizza because, you know, I'm too tired now. And, you know, it's late, it's late and I don't have a kitchen and all that. And, you know, I've been the king of excuses for the last few years. And so it's gotten me to the point where I'm like, man, this is what people go through every day. And, you know, when I was in my twenties, it was easy. I had a place and I could just go to the gym and I just go beast mode and shit and go crazy and then I could go home and I could you know cook up a pound of meat and three cups of starch and whatever and I could get away with it and then when I turned 35 and I started traveling on the road I couldn't get away with that shit anymore so I've learned how to kind of overcome that and I've learned what it what it's like to be basically general population I've gone from basically being an athlete to being general population and now trying to turn myself from basically zero to hero again trying to go from just a Joe average schmuck and trying to make myself back to what I used to be, which is a pretty, pretty hard out athlete. Yeah, man. An edge. Yeah, that's, that's a huge edge. And that's, that's where the coaching starts. You know, that's, that's the art of coaching, right? Is, is having those experiences, being able to relate to your clientele because that's the stuff they're going through and, and same stuff that we're talking about earlier. You've got a 20 something, you know, 20 something trainer and they're doing meal delivery and they, they don't travel at all. and they have no responsibilities whatsoever. It's like, yeah, you're shredded, dude, but you have no worries in the world. Yeah, and a 20-year-old, he's got access to all the drugs he wants. His only job all day is to eat, train, sleep, and then work Instagram, and that's all he has to do, you know. And then he sells $50 training programs that he sells to the same program to 5,000 people, and he's on easy street, you know. Yeah. I think, yeah, I mean, it's appalling what's happening in the industry, But, you know, it is what it is. And that's technology. Well, you know, along those lines, what would you tell people? You know, there's a lot of people listening that are, you know, wanting to get in shape. They're interested in health and fitness. They're, you know, 30 something, 40 something. And, you know, what should they be looking for? Like, let's say they want to go out and hire a trainer. You know, what should they be looking for? Number one, they need to ask around. They need to ask around. They need to interview the trainer. They don't have to stop with the first trainer they go to. they need to they they it's tough for general population because you and i can smell bullshit a mile away but the average person you can you can throw out a bunch of fancy words and they think you know what you're talking about because they have no clue what you're talking about so i can just rattle out a whole bunch of biochemistry terms and they're like oh my god holy shit and it doesn't i may not even know what those terms mean right so that's what they're dealing with so the number one thing is to ask around um stay off of fucking instagram if you're looking for a trainer because that's the worst place to find a trainer, right? Especially now that everybody's gone online. And I'm telling you, most of the trainers, I know a lot of really good online coaches. And then the rest of everybody else is just selling everybody the same program, calling it personal training. And they're just not doing it right. And I've been online training people since 2007. And I'm the first to admit, I'm not the best online coach. I'm a very good programmer. I'm horrible with communication, but that's why I hired Isaac because Isaac's the master of communication and he writes crazy, insane, awesome programs. So I had to find somebody who was much better than me to manage that so I could do other things because I just wasn't that great. I'm used to dealing with, with athletes where I can hand them a program and be like, all right, piss off. I'll see him for weeks. But now that the online coaching has gotten so competitive, people expect you to be available all the time and check in every week and all that. And that's just not my style. But Isaac does that very well. And I've learned a lot from him on how to actually do that. So I only work with a few people, but it's difficult these days because everybody talks a good game. It's hard to just to figure out who's who's bullshitting, who's not. I can tell you if it's a 20 something year old, whatever on Instagram, it's probably not the person you want to train with. If you want to get something really truly, a truly bespoke customized program that's made for you and it's personal, that's not the place to get it. Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that. Unless you're, you know, an 18 year old dude who just wants the big arms, you know. Yeah, and then, you know, go buy Charles Poliquin's book on arm training, Winning the Arms Race. Probably one of the best books I've ever read on making arms huge, right? So don't ask me because I've got naturally gigantic arms. Unfortunately, I've got a tiny little chest, so it looks funny. All right, good stuff. So we start to wrap it up here I curious you know because you were talking about using apps to our advantage to be able to help create more awareness help manage stress help be able to facilitate these types of programs So what are your favorite apps for, you know, the, you know, like health and wellness, stress management space? What are your favorite apps? I like I use elite hrv. That's what I use for my hrv and my heart rate. I love that app I love I love the argus app a r g u s it's like, uh It's kind of like facebook for like people like to work out So it gives you metrics on there that you can track and you can also friend people so I can friend my clients and I can get on their page and I can see how much water they've had that day How many steps they've had we do a lot of like step goals Um and have people walking more so they get away from their desk and that type of thing I like, there's one I like from the, uh, that I've got on my Mac because I'm really big in the Pomodoro technique. Again, I have to have stuff. Yeah. I have to have stuff that puts me against the clock because of that competitive nature. So it's called Tomighty, like T-O-M-I-H, uh, T-O-M-I-G-H-T-Y. and it goes on the little bar on your Mac. And when you turn it on, you can have it tick-tocking while you're working or you can just see that we're kind of counting down. And so I set it at 25 minute intervals. So 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And then I know that during that 25 minutes, I'm not allowed to do anything but smash out work. And you would not believe the focus you get when you see that clock going down and you just start working super hard and super focused. Yeah. Yeah. man there's so what's that those are all really good no i like the block the block productivity apps um or chunking out time that's that's good stuff they're huge i got no there's have you seen calorie mama no i don't know how accurate it is but you calorie mama you take a picture of your plate of food and it approximates how many calories and it's been really freaky like yeah i've gone to like chinese food restaurants and got like a prawn and noodle dish and it legit figures out that it's in prawns and noodles. And it's pretty freaky. I know you guys are fans of Headspace. I love Headspace. Yeah, me too. That's a good one. We've talked about Headspace before, but for those of you listening, if you're not aware of it, Headspace is just a great kind of guided meditation, if you will. It's almost like guided breathing. It's not even, I hate to use the term meditation because it freaks people out. They're like, I don't want to get all woo-woo like that, especially for the executive type guys. Like, no, no, no, it's guided breathing. And man, you can just get in the zone like right away with that app. It's crazy. What's cool about it too is, you know, if your mind is racing all the time, like part of the reason why I never could meditate was I couldn't stop thinking. And when I have that headspace on, I'm listening to the guy on it. And it's something about his voice that just puts me in a trance or either just knocks me out of sleep. So it's the only thing I've ever been able to use to actually get into that trance-like state where your body feels heavy and you're really getting into it. I use it for sleep, man, because one of the things that I teach clients is that you need to practice sleeping. You've got guys that say, it's so hard for me to get to sleep. That's because you're not practicing sleeping. What you're doing is you can't sleep after a minute, so you're bored, so you pick up your phone or you do something else. you got to start practicing. So start practicing, like taking naps in the afternoon and start practicing sleeping. If you want to get good at it, that's what you have to do. And one of the tools that we'll use is we'll use that guided meditation throughout through headspace to kind of get them chilled, chilled out because he's got that soothing voice, you know? Yeah. It's, and it's, you know, it's crazy because it's just 10 minutes or, and I, I just stick with like the 10 minutes. I can't, I haven't gone past that yet. attention span is possibly too short. But within that though, it feels like the more frequently you do it, it seems like that 10 minutes, all of a sudden it's like, it just goes by like nothing. Like you get started and you can start to get into a deeper, I don't know, Zen state. I don't know the terminology around it, but deeper Zen state. Like the more you practice it, the quicker you can switch it on to the degree that you can start to utilize those breathing techniques during the day and your body kind of recognized, like just start to do some deep diaphragmatic breathing and all of a sudden you can take your stress hormones way down. And then within the app, it's like, I've, I've done it. And I felt like I've been just doing it for like a minute and it will have been 10 minutes all of a sudden. Yeah. It's huge. It's pretty cool. You know, you're getting somewhere when you don't even need to have, like, I can do it now without the app. I can get myself into that kind of that feeling within a minute or two. But you know, when you talk about practice people think about practice like okay I going to practice hitting a I going to practice my golf swing But you have to practice your least mode Practice doesn stop at the gym When you go home you have to practice relaxing and that's what people don't do anymore. You have to practice being still. Just sit in the room and just be still and see how long you can do that. I mean, that's difficult, right? We just can't unplug anymore. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's just such good advice. And instead of, you know, like so many people, you know, we, we don't sleep enough, wake up early. Like I get up super early, I have long days, family. Um, and sometimes it's just like going somewhere, you know, and shutting off the lights. And I'll kind of like, I'll look at my phone and I, in fact, I did it right before our podcast and I was just like, I was just, you know, dragging and it's just like, shut the lights off. I'll lay down flat on my back, wherever it is. It could be just flat on the floor in a, in a room and just like, okay, mentally I'm like, it's going to be 10 minutes. So let's say it's 1257. I'm going to, I'm going to just go till just for till 107 and just simply doing that. Sometimes I fall asleep for a couple of minutes. Sometimes it's, I feel like it's just, you know, just unwinding and it makes an amazing difference in my energy, my, my cognitive function and for people doing something like that, as opposed to being like, Oh, I'm dragging, I better turn to a, you know, a double espresso or a muffin or some shit like that, you know? So I'm, you know, you're all, I'm on the same page. Yeah. Have you ever, you ever taken a coffee nap? no what's that all right so we get a double espresso or a quad or something like that and you uh get your headspace ready slam down the coffee slam down the coffee and then lay back and try to take it like a nap and 20 20 25 minutes later the coffee will wake you up and the research showed that it works better than a coffee or nap alone no kidding yeah i used to do it all the time when i was teaching i'd be just be sitting there waiting like waiting for the caffeine to kick and fall asleep before it kicks in fall asleep before it kicks in yeah that happens something like when you first start doing it but then you start like you start getting into it man i used to have the best naps i would because i was working such long hours and um lunch would hit and i had an hour and a half for lunch it was like all right first 30 minutes i'm gonna do my coffee nap so i would slam a couple of or i would take like a couple of caffeine pills you know 400 milligrams of caffeine and then i'll put the headspace on and i'd be out and i'd wake up like 20 minutes later, like right on the dot. Like, yeah, yeah, it's, it's nuts. And it's, it's part of the practice. Like I legitimately do that probably almost every day is sort of a midday, like just find a spot, lay down 10, 15 minutes, usually most 15 minutes, most of the time I'll fall asleep for, you know, part of that. Yeah. It just goes by like nothing. And it is crucial because I, you know, I just don't sleep enough. And so many of us don't. So you can plug in techniques like that to uh you know to help manage some of that stuff help but you know you gotta have that siesta it's okay it's okay because it is a thing man if you're tired the rest of the afternoon some people will say well i'm not going to take a little nap because if i take a nap that's time i can be working the thing is if you don't take that nap the rest of your work that day is going to be crap and there's no point in continuing to work if you're going to put out rubbish stuff yeah I'm going to be so much more productive I'm going to I'm going to be more present when I get home from work I'm not going to just be a sloth like I'll be home I'll get home I'll have more energy I'll make better nutrition decisions I'll be more mentally switched on and so the mindset of like you just have to be hustling all the time if you're not you're not committed you don't care you know it's like dude it's okay that you know to to chill out here and there and anyways with that? The thing is, you know, a lot of people, they're in such a rush to have success. Like, people want to be successful earlier and earlier and earlier that they then sacrifice things that should really mean more like family time and friendships and things like that and their health. So, you know, people look at taking time off like to spend time with their families in the evenings and things like that. They look at that, a lot of entrepreneurs look at that as, well, that's, that's time I could be training. And you know, I should be, that's selfish because I should be, I should be working harder and that type of thing. But the most selfish thing you can do is not spend time with your family and not spend time with your friends and destroy your health because you're just working too much because you're trying to provide for your family. And what you end up doing is you, you put yourself out of balance and then you're, you're forgetting what's actually really important, which is not money in business, you know? And that's, we see that with people every single day. I have to have this talk where I like I have to be real with people being like you doing the most selfish thing possible because you putting everything in front of you And now you depleting yourself to the point where you not going to be good for anybody later because you going to have a nervous breakdown and a heart attack Yeah. It's words of wisdom right there. So Luke, tell me what's going on with muscle nerds. You know, you said you guys do online training. You said you work with coaches kind of what's, what's in the pipeline here coming up. Yeah. So we've got online group training. So we've got pretty like really reasonably priced group training where we've come up with a good year and a half of programming that goes from just taking from bare nothing all the way up to like a fairly decent, really in shape lifter. And it comes to everything. You get the supplementation protocols, you get the nutrition protocols, you get the training, you get the conditioning and you get a form where you can go on. And it's we did that so we can open up really high level training for more people that maybe they can't afford one on one. so we did these like semi semi privates um and then we do obviously the personalized programming so we we train any people from rehab to um to physique to photo shoots to contest the models to and i typically handle all the you know big fat ugly power lifters and the strength athletes because that's kind of my thing that's what i like the best so i take a few of those guys on so we do that we've got some courses coming out in 2018 we're going to start we're actually shortening the courses that make it easier for coaches to get into. So instead of doing five day course, we're doing a three day and we're sending a lot of videos out instead. We've got some eight week courses that are all online with seminars at the end. So right now we have one going on for program design. And we find that a lot of people need help on learning the program design portion of things and how we do it and how to do traditional programming as well. And then we're going to come out with some modules for like, like we're talking about the gut, like the digestion simulation. So we're going to go really deep into that. We're going to come out with some metabolic courses and stuff like that to just really help trainers, you know, get through what's bullshit and what's real and learn real science and learn what science is important and how it applies to what they do. Because it's a lot of them are going to college and learning all the science, but they don't learn how to actually use it in their job. And that's what we're trying to do is teach them this is how you actually make this stuff work with what you do. So yeah. Yeah, well, I know you guys are doing a really good job with that stuff. And and it's not the sexy stuff, you know, unfortunately is sometimes for people looking to get healthier, improve their energy, lose weight. It's a step back before you take a step forward, at least in terms of those specific goals. And so, you know, the sexy stuff isn't telling people that they need to work out less and eat more and chill the F out and manage their stress. It's, you know, those 12 weeks you're going to be shredded program. And, and so I have a lot of respect for you guys that you are taking the least mode approach, but actually focusing on the things that people need to be focusing on and helping, you know, helping teach trainers, you know, those things so that they can get more results. So affecting change on a very broad and massive level. And yeah, so thanks for everything you do. Where can people find more about exactly what you were just talking about? We are currently getting our websites kind of redone. We're at musclenerds.tv. Um, but there, we're finally able to get someone to kind of go through that and get it. If you want information, you can always send stuff to info at musclenerds.net, uh, or Zoe, Z O E at musclenerds.net. Um, yeah. And you know, we're, we're here, we're on, uh, Facebook, obviously, we've got a page Muscle Nerds you guys have a great Facebook group that anyone can join anybody can join the Muscle Nerds it's Muscle Nerds Inc I-N-C so anybody can join that yeah and they can ask questions and we're happy to answer cool so I'll have all those links in the show notes and with that said Luke thanks a lot man it's been a pleasure it's always great catching up and we'll have to do this again soon absolutely thanks a lot Ben appreciate it all right brother take care bye see ya so I hope you enjoyed this episode of the smart nutrition made simple podcast if you did then go ahead and like and subscribe below and if you're listening on iTunes then make sure you subscribe to our channel and if you love the content that we're putting out there then leave us a five-star review it's really the best way that you can support us in our mission to get the best quality strength nutrition, fitness, and supplement information out there so that we can help more people. 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