#03 Luke Leaman and Zoe Knight PART 2

# #03 Luke Leaman and Zoe Knight PART 2

**Channel:** The Unknown Strength Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://anchor.fm/s/e9df58d8/podcast/play/76342498/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2023-8-25%2F348414086-44100-2-9ff63d9d11111736.mp3

All right, everybody, welcome back and thanks for joining us on the Unknown Strength Podcast, where we aim to provide you with insights into the fight game and strength and conditioning training that translates into optimal performance in the cage, the ring or on the mat. I'm your host, McGregor McNair, and joining me are my co-hosts, Brenton McKittrick and Steve Phillips. Now, this is part two of the Luke Lehman and Zoe Knight podcast, who are the strength and health optimization gurus behind MuscleNerds.net. So if you missed part one of the interview, definitely go back and listen to that from the start. Luke Lehman is one of the foremost experts on health hormone and general performance, and his partner Zoe is the managing director of the company and also a goldmine of information. And if you're a fighter or in the fight sports whatsoever, definitely listen to this interview in its entirety because there's so much valuable information that just about everyone in the fight game can benefit from. Absolutely. So without further ado, here is the interview. The sport of jiu-jitsu is incredibly group-orientated, particularly with the gi, even judo, so it's something you'd have a lot of experience with. You know that the hands take an absolute beating, so it's a fairly accepted reality, but by the time you get the black belt, you pretty much need to forgo any aspirations of being a hand model. So something that I find that sometimes my grip is the first thing to go on a strength session, having been so heavily utilized in my jiu-jitsu training. I feel like my hands become the weak point. My hands are so burned out. And when it comes to doing, I guess, the higher volume exercises like deadlifts sometimes, I feel like my back, my hips, my legs, my entire posterior chain could pull, you know, could pull a serious weight. But then I find that my hand just gripping it is a challenge. So do you have any suggestions or perhaps adaptations to the training, I guess to get value or get a result out of that? Yeah. You know, if you want to train your hands, you've got to train your hands. So some of the things we'll typically use are things like belt or gi pull-ups, right? So we'll do that. We also do ironmind.com. www.ironmind.com has a ton of grip stuff. And I used to be really big into the grip things and bending horseshoes and nails and tearing phone books and all that type of stuff. But if you want an adaptation to your hand, you have to train your hands, right? And a lot of the guys will get pretty gnarly hands. Our friend Leo over at the Irish Strength Institute enrolled with him just a little bit last time we were in Ireland. And I outweighed the guy by probably 30 kilos. He just completely fucking humiliated me. His hands, when he grabbed me, I thought I was going to shit my pants because I thought he was going to break my bones. and you would grab him and he's so explosive and so strong. It's like wrestling a piece of metal, you know. But doing things like the specific hand things like actually working your finger grip. So Iron Mind has a thing called Eagle, I think it's called Eagle Claw or Eagle Grip and you can hang that from a bar and you can do pull-ups with that and it causes you to actually work your fingers, not just your crushing grip. so that also keep in mind that you have muscles on the back side of your hand as well that never gets uh it never gets um worked so what what i used to do is i would get uh go buy a package of rubber bands and i would put the rubber bands around my fingertips and i'd extend my hands and what that would do is it would save it saves a lot of trouble with things like getting uh golfer's elbow kind of like an agonist antagonist type movement exactly same thing as we said with the boxers if you don't have a really good upper back and really good external rotators and really good scapula it's going to inhibit your ability to throw a punch really really hard so same thing with your hands you need to make sure you're working that antagonistic and you need to be working things for time like um you know if you're going to do like the grip strength you need for a deadlift or like a bar hang is going to be different than when you're actually using your fingers to hold on to a gi so doing doing hangs but hang on to your gi taking a belt and cutting it in half and wrapping it around a bar and doing your deadlifts by holding on to the belt instead or straps instead of holding on to the actual bar. Go rock climbing. Yeah, rock climbing. Oh, rock climbing. I actually went rock climbing about a month ago and I found that at the end of the week, after doing jiu-jitsu all week, my fingers are just that shot that I could definitely persevere through the pain but it's something that I guess requires delicate balance. So, um, like if you don't use it, if it's, it's going to fatigue and get sore. Yeah. Like the more you use it the more you become what the word I looking for Like accustomed to it Yeah And how many people will work their fingers but they don stretch the fingers back out They look like they have little lobster hands because they're always flexed instead of relaxed. Yeah, you've got to balance them out. Yeah, I mean, we had our first climbing experience in London with the guys at We Move Magazine. Yeah, man, these guys were like goddamn monkeys. They were just doing these ridiculous jumps from one platform to another, and Zoe and I were just trying to manage the first fucking level. Oh, man, yeah. Our fingers are gone after that. You see them pretty much launch or catapult themselves from one little grip to another just off their pinky. Yeah. So let me just change directions here for a minute. Luke, last year I think both you and Zoe spent some time with Stephen Howarth at Turning Point Strength and Conditioning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For those who don't know, Stephen's been strength and conditioning coach to some of the biggest stars out of the Jackson Wink Camp, including John Jones, Holly Holm, and people like that. Can you just share with us some of your key takeaways from your time with Stephen, please? Man, Stephen's a champ. I've known Stephen a long time. I was actually his coach for some physique stuff. So, and the guy, the guy has actually a really incredible physique once he polishes it down for show. He's, the guy is a super positive guy. He's created a really good culture at his gym. And what I really like is that he treats all of his clients like they're pro athletes. Like, not that he trains them like that, but they're all superstars, you know. It doesn't matter if it's Mary from next door or if it's John Jones. He treats everybody the same, which is something you don't normally find in facilities like that. But I tell you the number one takeaway, he put us on his Windgate bike, and my number one takeaway is I don't ever want to do another fucking Windgate sprint ever again in my life. I saw that video. That was hilarious. Oh, my God. I actually got off the machine, and my legs were slapping together. They burn for like 20 minutes afterwards. You're like, why won't they stop burning? I can't decide what's worse, the Windgate bike sprints or like Airdyne or Aerosalt, Tabata's both of them are equally as fucking awful what I liked about Stephen though is his knowledge is undeniable but what Luke teaches a lot in his courses is that you always have to have a why so whenever you write any program or you suggest any nutritional protocols or supplementations or anything there needs to be a really clear definite why as to why you're doing it and his why is there in every single aspect of everything he does he can tell you exactly every single dot of the i cross of the t why it's in their program and what it's doing all the way from 16 weeks out to fight day so he's got some really good um protocols he uses i don't really know them you'd have to call him and interview him for this but he uses with a kaiser of how he uses power and how he measures the power whether it's getting better or not and all that stuff so it's really really good stuff and discrepancies between left and right yeah making sure they're balanced he's Very, very smart. And a really nice guy. That's my biggest takeaway. I liked him. He's got some really good stories about some of the fighters and what they've done in the gym. Speaking of fighters, we've seen Conor McGregor doing some movement work with Ido Portal during the last year or so. And as I understand it, you've had some experience with Christopher Summers from Gymnastics Bodies in the movement field. So what are your thoughts on the movement culture and how that can apply to fight sports? Oh, man, I think it's great. I think the movement stuff is crazy good. But it's, you know, I've done, we, Joey and I went and did the gymnastic bodies seminar. And that was both awesome and completely exhausting and brutal. But we learned a lot. And I've been a big fan of Coach Sommer since he first put out his building the gymnastic body article on TMag, which was, god damn, that had to be like 12 years ago or something. And I also did a seminar with him when he came to the Polican Group. And Coach Sommer, he's just a really great guy. so much knowledge him and his right hand man orange they're just their whole team is just really like they're just champs man um we've done that we use a lot of that stuff mixed in with our own traditional barbell dumbbell work and uh my buddy mike fitch who owns uh animal flow and global body weight training i've done animal flow one and two and that's freaking incredible and i think a lot of this is you know you have a lot of people that can that don't have a problem going in and and they go and they squat 250 kilos, they can't fucking crawl around on the ground without getting winded, and I think that's kind of pathetic. And that's where I found myself. I was actually at Zach Trowbridge place in Chicago all strength training and I put on 365 pounds on the bar and was bench pressing And I said Oh I gonna see if I can do some push ups And I actually got on the ground did some push ups, stood up and went, fuck, I would rather throw three or four plates on each side of the bench and bench press than actually do a push up. And at that point, I was like, okay, this is ridiculous. Like, movement is one of the first things that goes when you get older, Like strength is fairly easy to gain. It's fairly simple for me to put. I've put 150 pounds on people's all their major lifts in less than nine months. That's fairly easy. What really goes is that mobility and that ability to touch your toes. And to basically master your vessel. And that's the thing. Doing a 250-kilo squat is fairly simple if you just follow the plan, but it's not that easy to get on the ground and get inverted in a handstand or to crawl around and not be completely exhausted. It's a very different skill set. Yeah, with a lot of the movements that are done in the gym, they're really structured. You're limited in your movement that you're able to do within that movement. if I've said this so many times, if that makes sense. But I think one of the biggest takeaways from when we done the Gymnastic Bodies Level 1, I think we were in London when we did that, weren't we? No, that was Animal Flow. Oh, that was Animal Flow. Yeah, Animal Flow. Yeah, sorry, Animal Flow Level 1 was that you have a body. It's all you have and you cannot control it. You don't have strength in movements where you should. We're designed to be a little more fluid than we are in our lifestyle. and it's so important to try and keep as much of it as you can because like Luke says, it's the first thing to go and what's the point in being able to deadlift 700 pounds if you can't even crawl on the floor with your child? What's the point of that? After being a competitive powerlifter for a long time, at one point I was deadlifting 340 or so and I was squatting over 300 and that was all cool but I just felt like shit. I couldn't move and I know guys that can barely wipe their own ass. you know they they're so bound up they they literally can't reach back they have to wipe between their legs like a in a p and you know they gotta have doo-doo up on their balls from that right there's no no man should be wiping between his legs that's something wrong with that but i know guys that they they strut around like a fucking peacock around the monolith and they're so fucking strong and they're so alpha macho bullshit and you can't even wipe your own ass they're like t-rexes they are fucking shoes so for me i finally got to a point where i was like okay i've been the biggest guy in the gym i've been the strongest guy in some gyms i don't need that shit anymore what i what i care about now is feeling amazing and doing a fucking cartwheel i can do a fucking cartwheel and i look it looks awesome and i and i'm really proud of it because i work really hard and that for a lot of people sounds so ridiculous but how many fucking gym meatheads do you know that can't do a goddamn cartwheel yeah it's so easy to get to get uh caught by uh our ability to move external objects and we just never we never really focus on internal objects moving ourselves and when you look at connor you you look at his movement since he started doing that and you know i'm giving the majority of his success always has to go with his fight camp and has to go with John Connor and all those guys but it's it's undeniable when you watch him fight the fight the more he does the movement stuff the more crisp he gets and now I mean look look at look at his last fight he barely gets touched his his ability to counter punch he the guys barely miss him he's his rhythm and his timing is so good now when somebody swings they just they whiff by millimeters and he's on them yeah he definitely flows seamlessly and that's always something really important as a fighter to be able to transition between various techniques and make them connect really well and gel and it's all about i guess the right technique at the right time and i mean as you highlighted being able to have the movement capabilities to um you know express that is absolutely paramount absolutely and and you know and to be able to do it and not waste any energy right and to be able to to be able to last five rounds yeah so smooth as fast so just out of interest who are some of the other fighters that that you'd watch in the UFC these days? You know, honestly, we don't watch that much. I really don't know that many of the fighters. Who's that guy that just recently won that was a real show pony? The real show, what's his name? You really liked him. I really liked him. I cannot remember his name. I would have said Conor, but we're already out of time. Yeah, I've been a big fan of Conor's for a few years now. I remember seeing him fight in Boston. I was living near Boston and John Conor got me a ticket and I was able to go and watch it And he just steamrolled past the guy who was fighting So I used to be hard out in it, man. Back in the day, I still have VHS tapes of when it first came out, and there were no fucking weight classes. So do I. Which is, you know, and I was trying to talk to Zoe about it, because she kind of got into this stuff recently. And I'm like, no, it was mania back then because you would have a 185-pound guy fighting a 660-pound sumo wrestler. That's right. UFC 1. UFC 1. I've got the video. Yeah. Taylor Tooley lost his teeth to Gerard Gourdeau. The UFC was brutal in the early days. Far too brutal. It's like fucking Kumite blood sport shit, you know? Exactly. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Is that the guy? Yeah. I don't even know how to say his name. Garbrandt? Cody Garbrandt, yeah. Yeah, that guy. No love. I fucking love that guy. You love his tats? His what? His tats. No, you know, I like... You watched him fight Cruz, I think it was. I don't like the showboating, but I do like the counter-punching and the rhythm and the timing and the crispness and the power. And the footwork. You were really impressed with his footwork. The footwork, man. I've got a buddy, my buddy Rob Pilger in Ohio. he was a golden gloves boxer now he owns a really really nice training center and you know he was telling me uh i saw him post on facebook once he goes if you walk into a boxing place and they start teaching you how to punch before they teach you footwork leave so ever since he said that i'm always watching people's footwork and his footwork and his timing was just fucking ridiculous absolutely that's where the power is generated and that's what transfers through the body and that's the thing like i'm just a big fucking ogre like when i when i get in the fights, I just grab them, put them on the ground, lay on top of them. So that's my special gift. Nothing wrong with that strategy. No. It keeps me from getting punched in the face, which I don't really care for too much. But to watch some of these guys and the complete power and control they have is phenomenal. And I think a lot of the Joel Jamison stuff is gold as well of teaching people that some aerobics is necessary, that the aerobic system buffers the anaerobic system, and that the anaerobic system is really there to take over when the aerobic system cannot make energy fast enough. If you keep that perspective on things, it gives you the knowledge of why it's so important to make yourself a wide aerobic base and then build your anaerobic stuff on top, and why you need to have some power endurance, because you need to be able to punch over and over and over without getting fatigued. Interesting. I've just got a question about that. I hear all the time, a lot of people, I've got a lot of friends who say, oh yeah, I really want to do jujitsu, but I think I just need to get fit first. I just need to do a few things and I don't want to come out of shape. And I always say, well, it doesn't matter how fit you are. When you start jujitsu, everyone's going to maul you and everyone's going to take away your energy reserve. So, I mean, something you touched on there, I guess, does that apply to actually weightlifting, do you think? Or in terms of anaerobic exercise, as you said, you've got to build that aerobic foundation yeah it can there are techniques you can you can do and you know look if somebody thinks that they're going to be able to prepare themselves for jujitsu they're out of their mind i thought the same thing and within the first 45 seconds i was in the bathroom puking my guts out so there's just nothing that you can't there's nothing you can do to prepare you but there's things that you can do once you get used to it that can make you a better fighter and some of the things like i like joel jameson's his uh hict training um which you can do in a localized manner so say like an upper body ergometer where you would crank the intensity up so high where you have to really grind against it and the the machine's only moving at say 20 25 rpms or single strokes right what's that or single strokes and you do that you do that straight for 10 minutes And what it does is it teaches your fast twitch fibers to be more oxidative so that you can have repeated bouts of punching or repeated bouts of grappling without building too much lactate and without losing fatigue. And it simulates a fight more in that respect as well, more bursts of energy as opposed to sort of sustained application of force. Exactly. And, you know, when you look at conditioning, you have to look at systemic conditioning, which would be your cardiovascular system, right? So what adaptations are you trying to create in the heart? So what's the number one thing you need to create more fuel is you need oxygen. What do you run out of when you fight? You start running out of oxygen. So building things like left ventricular size, building things like better vascular networks, increasing nitric oxide, things like that, you do systemically with generalized conditioning. But then you also have local conditions where you can target train those specific muscle fibers in in your extremities by doing things like upper

lower body ergometers and certain strength training movements. But you really need something, too, in my opinion, that's very concentric versus eccentric orientated, right? So making sure that you don't want a lot of eccentric work when you're doing your conditioning because the eccentric work is what causes a lot of the muscle breakdown. All you really want is that concentric work mainly, right? So doing things like hitting the bag, you know, but doing it in specific intervals. Right. And so since we're talking about some of Joel Jamison's methods, I've noticed that you're a big proponent of Joel's BioForce HRV system recently. Can we just go into a little bit more detail about autonomic nervous system function and how you guys monitor and optimize your training and nutrition protocols based on things like heart rate variability? Yeah, absolutely. So like we discussed before, we do a waking heart rate variability. So that's, for me, the best time to take it because you're not affected yet by getting out of bed and doing things. So a lot of the guys that we get, because they only do anaerobic training because they're all scared shitless of aerobics, they're all scared shitless of carbs, so we have to completely reprogram their thinking. I've had guys that they've been strength coaches for five years. they come to me and their heart rate's 85 when they wake up. That's ridiculous. They feel like it's very high. Even resting heart rate, you look at resting heart rate, maybe 65, your waking heart rate really should be in the low to mid 50s, in my opinion, if you're really balanced. When we look at that, we say, okay, your heart rate's too high. That shows that you are epinephrine and norepinephrine dominant, you're sympathetic dominant, you need to be parasympathetic dominant. Again, that sympathetic system is primarily there to get you out of danger. So if it's keyed up all the time, your body thinks you're jacked up all the time, you're not going to get the benefits of the parasympathetic system, which is rest and digest. So a lot of these guys, they complain about gut issues. They've got diarrhea, constipation, bloating. They've got tons of they can't eat anything because i've got food intolerances right all of this stuff is related to stress and what's gnarly is that the brain has that direct link to the gut and it can it can stimulate permeability in the gut because of stress you don't really need cortisol to make that happen your brain can make that happen so i was gonna say on the food intolerance part um is that obviously is there a strong correlation between stress and you know being having predisposition to food intolerances or even exacerbating them absolutely and the majority of food intolerances so you look at a food allergy versus a food intolerance a food allergy is something like somebody's got a peanut allergy and they eat a peanut and they fucking go into anaphylaxis shock right when you look at a food intolerance the majority of those are temporary things that have happened because you're not mitigating your stress so when you're stressed out, you have the tight junctions in the cells in your gut lining, they start to get loose. Those tight junctions are only supposed to let certain size particles into your bloodstream. Well, when they get loose, then you get food that is only partially digested. It's not completely broken down. That'll make its way into your hepatic portal. You'll have bacteria and viruses that allows those to permeate through. So you think of that lining inside of your GI tract, That's the skin for the inside of your body. And what does skin do? Skin keeps things out that's not supposed to be in there, right? So when you start allowing that stuff in there, around 80% of your immune system is located in and around the gut. So that creates a hypersensitive immune system, and you basically get what I call an autoimmune disease towards food. So then every time, let's say you had a stressful event and you're eating a lot of chicken, and now you're getting reactions to chicken, you're going to have to get off of chicken for a while and switch to something else and do an elimination diet. But you're never going to get better if you don't calm that stress response down. For most people, that means not training as much and working on your least mode. And you can take, like, glutamine is important, but you can take all the glutamine you want. If you don't take care of your head and your stress management, you're never going to fix your stomach. So one of the things that we see fight athletes going through that is incredibly stressful is weight cut. So whether people are participating or competing in an event where there's a same-day weigh-in, so let's say five minutes before your event or your first fight, you weigh in, you go to the bullpen, you wait, or a 24 weigh where you go through that process of cutting down and then building back up in time for fight time Do you have any comments or any observations around mistakes that people make going through that cutting process? Yeah, for one thing, don't get fat in your off-season. That's part of it is just the simple fact that fighters let themselves go and they think that if they're heavier, they're going to train better, but that's simply not the case. you know if you're if you're fighting at 155 there's no reason for you to be 178 you know leading into four months out from your show and if or from your fight and if you are you need to start cutting that down especially if you have a same day weigh-in you simply just don't have enough time to to put water back in your body and that's super important where does that weight come from they're cutting shit tons of water okay when you cut shit tons of water and you get dehydrated your performance goes down you gas out much faster you need water to make more energy right you need so it's it's asinine for them to think that they they need to be 15 16 kilos heavier when they're you know entering that their prep and that's simply not the case they'd be better off if they slowly lean themselves out and stay at just a few kilos above their fighting weight so then it's a really minimal water loss uh for the actual competition or performance right now if it's a 24-hour weigh-in that's pretty easy you know uh i like uh what's his name mike dolce i really like his uh like i when i was powerlifting it was nothing for me to do you know 12 13 kilos and 24 hours on a weight cut and then blow back up the next day for uh my powerlifting but that's a whole different thing that's all that's an all-day event i'm doing basically doing nine reps total all fucking day i'm not going in there and trying to fight somebody for five minutes, right? So it's a bit different ordeal. We used to use things like I would cut carbs out about five days out. I would cut my water down a little bit. I would sit in a sauna, take a laxative and take a massive shit. You know, I'd usually do it. So you simply, I know fighters do it, but it's not the right thing to do because you end up not being as crisp. You end up getting hurt. Your timing's off. You can't think. You have no energy. So it's much better for them to do it more slowly with it with mike he has that uh his hot tub protocol it's hot tub step protocol and i i actually have tried it a bit the last couple of weeks just to see how well it works and i've got my own protocol because i don't have a hot tub uh basically what i do in the bathtub and i can i can pull off about two to three kilos in about 45 minutes it's sitting in a hot bathtub so and what is what does that entail so with his step one you basically get in uh in a hot tub up to your neck and you spend some time in there and then you know you say like five six minutes then you go up to chest height for five or six minutes then you go up to waist height and then you kind of you sit on the edge with your feet in the water and then you can repeat that as much as you can with mine since i don't have a uh we've got a fairly decent sized tub i'll go down to my neck uh basically netflix and chill and get under the water and as hot water as i can handle and i'll i'll stay there for five or six minutes and then i'll go up to where I'm just sitting in the water and it's nothing for me to pull off three kilos in 30, 40 minutes, sometimes four, four and a half. And you follow that with wrapping yourself in towels or lots of hoodies and, you know. No, I haven't yet because I'm just doing it basically to experiment because now that I'm in Brisbane, I have a lot of friends at Powerlift and they're always asking for advice. And so I'm working on, I never put, I never do anything with anybody that I haven't actually done myself. So now I'm actually just kind of playing with this stuff. And it's a bit silly, but on Saturday is my birthday, and I want to hit a double bodyweight deadlift. And so I'm trying to get my bodyweight down to 100 kilos and pull like 210 or something. So I'm practicing this because the night before the morning of, I'm going to get in the bathtub and try to shred some water off and kind of cheat the system a little bit. Nice. What bodyweight are you sitting at the moment? What's that bodyweight? Yeah. uh around 104 to 106 nice yeah and i haven't really trained i haven't had a i think right now has been my my longest training uh program i've had in four years like what have i trained and you've been running so i had a chap phil lerney challenged me to deadlifting so i have to pull 200 but and then uh troy uh he uh challenged me to a 5k so i'm trying to run a sub 25 minute 5K while I'm also trying to do a 200 kilo or 210 kilo deadlift, so I'm training for both of these at the same time while trying to diet, so it's pretty rough. Hybrid athlete. Yeah I really like Alex Vieta hybrid athlete stuff And you know really I think that the way of the future man where the the strength conditioning industry is getting to the point where um we know how to do all of it at the same time if you're patient yeah yeah this is putting all the pieces together the right way right exactly and understanding that you don't you can get really strong doing 10 10 sets in a workout you don't have to do 30 right yeah like i've literally put on 60 60 kilos on my deadlift in the last four weeks wow that's insane yeah i was like see i hadn't i hadn't been training in a long time i went and i pulled 150 and that was kind of that was a bit of a struggle i've had some injuries in my upper back where i'm kind of gun shy and i'm pulling around 200 to 205 now so that's huge yeah well good luck for your birthday that double body weight pull yeah hopefully i don't snap something in my back again So let's just change directions for a moment. Luke, since one of your strong suits is picking the right supplementation protocols, have you got any hacks or supplement stacks that may benefit fighters with the performance, recovery, or cognitive function? Yeah, so like stated earlier, lactate is a big deal. So some of the things we'll give, we find that guys that are overly producing lactate are typically deficient in vitamin B1 and thiamine. So we typically give them a little bit of benfothiamine, which is a fat-soluble B1, which is something I got from Michael McAvoy from Metabolic Healing. It works really, really well, like around 500 milligrams twice a day. We also use a lot of things, like we use the beta-alanine. We use creatine a lot for the mental game and also for more energy production. Something else that's of interest, And this is not something I recommend people do. You really need to know about methylation. But in order to make the backbone for ATP, which is your body's energy currency, you have to have good methylation pathways, right? So adding in a little bit of methylated folate and or making sure you're eating a lot of good leafy greens, so a lot of cooked spinach, kale, stuff like that. and you know we try to use as much food nutrition as we can and then we utilize supplementation on top of that so we look at energy production and we look at dampening inflammation okay so what we use for that is we use a berberine we'll also use things like bergamot extract we use things like curcumin we use a lot of curcumin a lot of curcumin a lot of boswellian I love the approach to try and address all the needs with whole foods first good quality whole foods first and then supplementation is needed I think that's fantastic but tell us what are your thoughts on nootropics? I like nootropics it just depends you know it depends which ones you're talking about and which country you're in because the legality of those are starting to get a bit It's shifty. Like in America, it's pretty open. I know the UK just passed some legislature a while back, a few months ago, regarding the importation and selling of nootropics. So I think they're banned there now. So I don't typically use them with people a lot, depending. If you're talking about the racetams and things like that, we don't really use those a lot with people just because you never know how they're going to react to them. so we will use a lot of uh acetyl carnitine acetyl tyrosine we use a lot of choline alpha gpc um um what else uh huperzine stuff like that so i i like to use things that are complementary to each other like um we're really big on thorn research we like their supplements uh and i use a lot of neurochondria so we like the lehman brain stack that i came up with was neurochondria memoractive and resveracell which basically takes care of energy production in the brain and blood flow to the brain and memory so i'm telling you when i'm taking that stack i swear to god i can hear people thinking i'm gonna need to re-listen to this podcast just to write down all those names and half those words most those words were new to me well so like you know i'm I'm really big into the energy creation, creation of energy and things like that and anti-aging. So when you look at energy creation in the brain, your brain will chew up at minimum about – if you're dumb, your brain will chew up about 25% of your resting metabolic rate. If you're studying like Zoe and I do and our guy Isaac, we're always studying. We're always writing. We're always coming up with things. Your brain is going to chew through energy a lot faster. So it makes sense to give your body nutrients that is going to force your brain cells to make energy faster right So that kind of the basis of the Lehman brain stack That fantastic Thank you for sharing that. You bet. So over the time that we've spent together, there's been a lot of information that we've covered. So have you got any recommendations around books or further reading for either for us or for any of our listeners who might want to delve into some more detail about any of the stuff we've talked about? Yeah, you know, Joel Jamison's side is always a good one. It's www.8weeksout.com. I think for people that want to start learning about training, Super Training by Mel Siff, that's a classic that you have to read. And it's one of those books you read 800 times before you figure it out. Also, Cracking the Metabolic Cold by James LaValle. That's huge. That's huge. And you've got to read that like 10 times before you figure that out. the first book of training I ever had was Poliquin Principles by Charles Poliquin. That was the one that started it all for me. I highly recommend that. Classic that and his Modern Methods of Strength Training is also excellent. One that I've gotten into lately by James Smith is called The Governing Dynamics of Coaching. That's right along there with super training. It's very highly technical. It's one of those you read a page about 50 times before you finally figure out what he's trying to say and then obviously there's our seminars our seminars are always good or consultations shameless plug shameless plug wim hof too i'm we've gotten big into the breathing so we're getting into i got into wim hof stuff which was awesome for resetting uh autonomic tone and now we've we've started magic like modifying some of his stuff and adding another stuff from yoga and I'm working on like free diving breathing because what I found was all of my friends at free dive, they're all shredded all the time. It doesn't matter what they eat. They're all shredded. You need oxygen to create energy. You need oxygen to keep your acid-base balance correct so your body's not constantly fighting acid. Most of these guys, they're always super chill, super calm and shredded. We kind of got into that. I find that the more you learn how to breathe and utilize oxygen the easier it is to stay lean and the easier it is to be able to eat your lollies or your tim tams without getting fat so that's always that's a bonus for me yes that's a bonus for me i was gonna say uh rickson hicks and grace here as they call it and spell with an r but um one of the og legends of the brazilian jiu-jitsu scene he says that if you can control your breath you can control your life 100 100 i've got a book called breathology that i'm starting to read and And it's by a really famous freediver. And it's got a lot of philosophical stuff in there about how breathing can completely transform your life. And when people get stressed out, they stop breathing normally. They start breathing with their chest and they don't use all of their lungs. I think it's also worth noting in that regard that we actually have a lot more control over ourselves than we think we do. Not just in regards to breathing but also in regards to lifestyle and like the epigenetics. So like your DNA and all that sort of stuff. Like we have a lot more say in how our body responds to stuff than most people realize. And that's something that Wim Hof is, they're doing research on him on how he's able to control his immune system, how he's able to keep his core body temperature elevated even though he's submerged in ice for over an hour, right? How he can run through the desert, run a marathon without drinking any water. Yeah, it's mind-blowing. it's so strange because I mean there's no scientific explanation for what's going on it seems like he's willing it to be so exactly and it's it's all part of that breathing and you know he may not be right about all the stuff and that's typically how it works we find a method that works now we have to figure out why it works and that's that's the goal of science is to prove or disprove stuff and then to figure out the why something works and it's it's pretty amazing that for a long time we didn't think that we had any control of our autonomic nervous system but what he's shown is you absolutely have control but you have just like anything else you have to practice and you have to work on it and I can tell you right now as I'm as I'm trying to develop these new breathing techniques that we use in our practice you put on a heart rate monitor like a bioforce or put on a polar h7 or what what have you that measures your heart rate variability put it on the bio force app or put it on the lead HRV or put it on sweet beat or whatever app you use practice your breathing and watch what happens to your your heart rate variability and what I'll typically do is is to teach somebody this I'll start doing some hyperventilation training and I can completely crash their HRV and then so their their sympathetic system is getting all crazy and then I've got techniques to bring them back out of that and actually jump

their HRV 10 or 15 points above where they started when they first started the practice. So have you seen in the hard data in terms of your own personal experience from implementing Wim Hof methods, have you noticed that, you know, you've been able to consistently drop your HRV or your HR? A hundred percent. Like when I first started messing around with it, my heart rate was in the mid seventies. Like after I left Pollock and group that I was a very, it was a very stressful time for me the last, the year after that. And, you know, I was having a hard time controlling my stress and it was it was not. So I started measuring my HRV. My HRV was around 48 to 52. My my rest, my waking heart rate would be anywhere from 75 to 80. I started doing using Joel Jamison stuff and started doing different types of techniques for aerobic work. I cut my training down a little bit, started doing stretching and aerobics that helped a lot. But once I started doing the Wim Hof breathing, within a week, my HRV was 81 and my heart rate was 52. And Luke's like super analytical. Like he gets obsessed about stuff. So when he's like learning about something or looking into something, for instance, if he's tracking his blood sugar, his ketones or anything like that, he'll do something and then he'll retest. And then he'll do something and he'll retest and he'll do something and he'll retest. And he's literally spending the day just testing to see how things change and how he responds to different things. and he just gets this massive amount of information just from all the testing he's doing on himself and me and others. You guys should see my fingertips right now because I draw blood from my fingertips probably 15 times a day. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I can barely get blood out of my fingers now. I'm going to have to start stabbing my toes. You guys, I'm looking at the time here. We're at a 90-minute interview so far. so um that went by it did went went too much fun we could we could sit here talking all night i reckon but we probably should start to wrap things up so for luke and zoe muscle nerds what have you guys got planned for 2017 learn how to run a business yeah it's on our back end but on our front end we've got you know refining level one and two a little bit more starting to write a level three and a test because we're gonna have a test you have to come to level one and two then you have to test to be able to go to level three and that's where things are gonna get really serious we've got a lot of methods and techniques we doing we hired on Isaac to start growing that online business our online training we do online training group training and one stuff Yeah We got a few seminars planned as well So we're obviously next month we're in Singapore and Hong Kong. Then we've got Perth in April, which is our last Level 1 and 2 that we're holding in Australia this year. And then we're doing a joint seminar with Eugene Teo, the body mechanic. So we're doing a bodybuilding and physique seminar with him in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane. And when's that? Huh? We're doing the one in May. What's that? Yeah, that's in May, is it? No, no, no. We've got it. Well, yeah. No, there's one in June, one in July, one in May. Yeah, there is one in May. We're doing one in New Zealand, which is a really interesting one. It's called When It's Not About the Food. So that's addressing the whole mental and psychological issues around why people self-sabotage um and so like you could write the perfect plan uh exercise and nutrition for your client but as soon as they start getting results they just self-sabotage and go back to where they were usually there's an underlying issue with that so we're teaming up with a counselor in new zealand um and we're holding a two-day seminar there in may so she's going to teach trainers what to look for and and what is in their pay grade to talk to their clients about and when to refer out and what it all means and how to get them over these mental blocks and get them moving again so yeah so that's going to be a really good one yeah um and then in august we back over to the northern hemisphere so we do uh montreal texas london yeah and then i've got one that i'm coming up with i've had a lot of people ask how how it is that we can absorb and recall and remember so much information and so i think we're going to write a seminar on learning how to learn and talk about the biochemistry of memorizing stuff and retrieval and teach people how to actually learn because that's part of the problem with people going to seminars. Our seminar is extremely heavy with information. It's super intense and I've dialed it back a little bit because people just couldn't absorb all of it. So what we want to do is teach people how to actually learn and then how not to memorize things, but how to do active recall and how to apply it to their clients and to their lives which is vastly different than just going to a seminar and writing notes. And it's funny because when you actually start to learn stuff and understand it it not so much about memory as it is understanding So you don have to just remember all these random facts You actually have you know things start to have links and you start to understand So it easy to be able to recall information And you have to know how to apply it That's the thing. How do I apply it? So it's more about internalizing the concept as opposed to, you know, memorizing all the little finer details that comprise the greater concept that you can recall and execute as you need and apply it to a specific situation. Absolutely. And, you know, the industry already has enough know-it-alls that they repeat things they hear and they have absolutely no idea what the fuck they're talking about. Yeah, brainless mantras. Right. We need more people that actually talk about things that they know about and know how to use instead of just throwing out big words to try to sound smart. It's another thing I teach Luke when he was writing Level 1 is because I remember when I walked away from bio-signature, I was like, I felt more dumb than I did before I went in. I was just like, I don't understand this near enough to be comfortable to use it. So there's no point in me telling someone, oh you've got estrogen dominance when I can't even explain what estrogen dominance is or how it happens or how the supplements are actually going to help counteract that and all that sort of stuff so I said like we need to give stuff that's applicable instantly so they understand and they can go away and the next day they can use it because that's where the value is absolutely and that's a common complaint about a lot of the early biosignature courses that were just too overwhelming yeah yeah well and they're teaching a lot of stuff that has absolutely no relevance on what trainers do like you can't learn hormones in three days no and that what we teach in what we teach in our our seminars is you don't really have a lot of control over that stuff anyways especially as a trainer but what you have a lot of control over is teaching people how to reduce and manage stress which is why all their hormones are fucked anyways yeah all right you guys we better leave it there um now of course we're going to post some links on how our listeners can get in touch with you guys but why don't you just give us the rundown right now on how people can reach out yeah you can get us online at muscle nerds.net you can get us email as info at muscle nerds.net we're also on facebook we've got that and just muscle nerds muscle nerds and then if you want to give us a phone call it's 040-279-2864 wow mobile number love that give him a call in the middle of the night don't call me in the middle of the night asshole but you can call if you ever want to say give me sweet nothings in my ear and what's up no that great well thank you so much for sharing with us such a huge amount of valuable information that our listeners will no doubt take heaps from So yeah, from Brenton, Steve, myself, thank you so much for joining us on the Unknown Strength Podcast. Hey guys, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys. All right. See ya. See ya guys. You're all that I can see Is this a dream? electric guitar solo You're all that I can see Is this a dream? Yeah guitar solo We'll be right back.