Mitochondrial Health and Bulking Risks

And that's the problem of bulking too is people think they need way more calories than they actually need to grow because they think that, you know, think about your first bulk. You start eating food and you have a massive jump in your scale weight because more water, more glycogen, more sodium, more fecal matter. And you go, well, this is great. I put on five pounds in a couple of weeks. But now I've plateaued. What are you going to do? I'm going to add more food. And then you just keep adding more and more and more. And then you're plateaued. You're eating like 7,000 calories. You're sick of eating and you're not really seeing any more positive effects of it. And now your blood sugar is fucked up. So you go, well, I'll just start smashing either pharmaceuticals or nutraceuticals to get my blood sugar better. But like the easiest fix would just cut down your calorie consumption a little bit. That's super easy to do that. And over time, what ends up happening is you start getting mitochondrial dysfunction. So then now you want to go into your cut and you haven't. Most people aren't going to do cardio during their off season. They go, I don't need to do cardio because I'm trying to grow. yeah, but there's other things that are important, like keeping your mitochondria healthy and keeping them happy, then they start doing a cut and their cut's not going as well as they thought because now they have this small period of time where they have to reestablish good mitochondrial volume and good mitochondrial activity because they absolutely wrecked that when they gotten too fat So if you look at fat people I know we supposed to say we not supposed to call people fat anymore maybe call them gravitationally challenged or something like that surface area challenge i don't know but when you look at fat people uh they tend to have really really massive mitochondrial dysfunction they don't have an issue releasing fat from fat cells they have an issue getting rid of the fat because they don't have the mitochondrial power to turn that in the heater energy. Right. So there's a big difference between that somebody who's about to step on stage, people who are about to step on stage have the opposite problem. They can oxidize really well, but they have a hard time releasing fat from fat cells because they're getting to those really low levels of body fat and their body doesn't want to release that. So then they have to do more and more extreme things to try to influence fat release so they can get that last little bit off their ass. Yeah. Right? And get nice walnut ass. And that's the hardest point to get. Like fupa fat for guys and that last little bit on your ass to get a nice grainy walnut butt. Yep. So it's like you have like, it's the same systems, but they're expressing themselves quite differently. So when you start getting too fat in a bulking, you are now pushing yourself to a point where oxidation is not going to be as good. Your energy is not going to be as good. You're going to be tired after eating your food. And that's just in your training. It's not going to, it's going to be good until the point where nothing's working well. Nothing feels good. Now your training sucks, but people will go, well, I just need more drugs. They'll throw on GDAs. They'll throw in more steroids. Throw in some Clinton. Throw on some. Oh, I hate Clinton. Albuterol. That's the one. Stop taking Clinton. Take Albuterol. Way better. Well, there was a third one, wasn't there? I don't remember what it was called. I'm just brain farting today to be honest, but okay. Um, If you can get with one of the research companies and get some liquid albuterol, this is what we used to use. Like three milligrams right when you wake up, three milligrams at lunch. The nice thing is the half-life isn't as long as Clin, so you can still sleep on it. You don't get the headaches. You don't get all sketched out. That's nice. Yeah, I just took Clin at like the lowest minimal dose, so I didn't have to feel any of the side effects. But then you kind of wonder, like, how much is this helping? Is it even worth taking a drug? um but and clen will clen will you'll get desensitized to it really quickly so then what are you going to take some bromocryptine to resensitize you're going to take two weeks on two weeks off without butyrol because it's only in any part of the day you don't tend to have that desensitization as long as you just stick to two doses okay okay um maybe we can talk to talk about this another time i've had some other guys that wrote like a uh their own ebook on clen going through the research credible studies showing that like clen you actually don't desensitized to so the whole two weeks on two weeks off thing is not actually necessary but you know yeah i'd like to look at that because i i mean i can remember like back in the day we'd start with like 20 milligrams right today and next thing you're taking like 60 to 80 yeah it's not working anymore right exactly i remember that as well and i think um i think basically the ebook and these guys are passing that that's that's why you don't just listen to the symptoms like the side effects the the whole like this the systemic the the stimulant the feeling of it being a stimulant is not tied to its productivity yet in increasing your fat burning but i just i just didn't like it because the headaches and the insomnia yeah yeah right that just like fights against your productivity anyways but um okay i like that you were talking about this because um one of the top bodybuilding coaches and one of the most hyped coaches in the industry right now stefan kienzel boss of outlaw who has 16 olympians at this last olympia he likes to keep things simple and he also says like you know a lot of people will just increase their amounts of gdas or add these anti-diabetic medications but the problem is here is like you're just adding more that a lot of the times like these anti-diabetic medications just starts to fuck up your digestion then that causes a lot more issues as well a ton more issues including you know not having a small gut when you go on stage so um it's just a lot to think about when people are adding drugs and medications, like how does this affect you? Because it just affects us all differently. And I know sometimes like for me, like I've had some good, some good experiences with berberine, but then when I added RALA, berberine, propium, like any of these things that should help blood sugar, you know, I've started to feel a lot of issues as well and digestive issues. And obviously I just wanted to try these just to see how my body would respond because, you know, you never really know, but it's, um, it's a complicated place, you know, being in bodybuilding. And I, I agree with you. The smartest thing is just to do the dietary needs that you feel like your body needs to stay healthy. I think it's like things like Berberine and Metformin aren't primarily GDAs Their primary the primary goal of taking those is to dampen gluconeogenesis in the liver So that why you have a diabetic then you know they have an increased amount of sugar production and release from the liver So they do help they do help somewhat with glucose disposal. But one of the main things they do is try to dampen down the liver's ability to push glucose into the bloodstream. So that's the main action. Like my wife, she was having some blood sugar issues. She's finishing out clinical nutrition. We have multiple business were running like she's like burning the candle at both ends and she was she was basically borderline diabetic and this is one of those cases too where people think that you have to be big fat slob to be diabetic that's not the case like my wife is tiny she's all about 120 125 pounds i feel like it's more genetic than everything is it not well it's stress right for her it's it's stress right and and prioritizing school and work and not prioritizing her own health. So I put her on berberine. I cut her down to a lower carb diet. We started a CGM, so started monitoring her blood glucose with an implant. And we started berberine, myonositol, some other B vitamins, I think a little bit of bergamot, some extra magnesium, and cut her carbs down pretty drastically. And it worked like in three weeks, we're at a point where now she was hypoglycemic. So I was like, okay, we went too far the other way. So now we need to figure out what's working, what's not, and how to, what can we remove and what can we add, like adding more carbs and removing some of the, um, not the glucose, but the, uh, like the berberine for, um, the output of the liver, liver glucose. And over time we've been able over a few months, we've been able to get her really smooth, really nice area under the curve. She's not waking up with hyperglycemia anymore. Um, she's not waking up with hypoglycemia either, but it, you know, it took some like strategy to do this, but with her, like you said, the berberine, the gut issues, she was getting gut issues with berberine, which I don't, I don't get them when I take it. So we moved to a phytosomal berberine and that actually worked a lot better because the phytosomal doesn't get, um, it doesn't affect your gut microbiome like traditional berberine. how's she doing now yeah she's good now you guys found like a the perfect middle ground yeah it's good it's good i think once she's finished with school and that's that big stress off the first few years of school wasn't difficult for her but then like the last year year and a half she actually has to be in clinics she has to work with patients and um because like having our companies and dealing with sports nutrition her views on how nutrition should be is not exact doesn't exactly line up with her professors so it's a constant battle with her of them thinking 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein is enough for people and her going well actually it's showing them data on you know 1.8 2.2 some issn stuff and they just keep arguing whether that uh the old shit that extra protein is going to turn into fat and extra protein oh my god is going to make you osteoporotic and it's going to kill your kidneys it's like all that 20 years old data that we know is not true anymore so i was just like babe just tell them what they want to hear and just get the degree and then you could do whatever you want after the fact damn that's insane okay well cool man um that was actually absolutely insane that we're going almost uh three hours so i just wanted to thank you for coming on the podcast but where can everybody find you yeah thanks for having me uh we're at our social media shit we're every year we say we're going to do better 2025 that's the year muscle nerds underscore education is our instagram we don't really do tiktok and facebook's pretty much dead so that's where yeah muscle nerds uh muscle nerds underscore education on ig and then if you want to i do a lot of unpolitically correct memes on my personal account i just don't fire i just don't talk any business related stuff on there but if you like if you like memes that get me in trouble a lot and you go to mine at luke lehman is just luke lehman elliot that's it and every time you see a massive amount of posts i'm taking a shit so you can think about me sitting there taking a shit posting memes fire yeah you guys should uh i don't know if you guys do this you guys use reels do you guys post reels we do yeah yeah okay you should uh you should just post those reels without any like trade or without any time stands for trademarks or whatever on um uh youtube shorts and then tiktok as well if you're not ready and then snapchat as well also has okay these spotlight basically spotlight where you can basically post your reels on there as well so just the same exact reels but on these other platforms because there's different people on the platforms it really nice yeah we gotta do that because that's the thing i want to do 2025 i want to start like long format stuff on youtube and just lock that in as well. So I just, it's getting, man, where's the time? Like, where's the time?

I know, man. All this shit. I know. People were like, dude, you must have the best life being a creator. I'm like, you don't really get how time consuming this is. No, people have no idea. Yeah. It's horrendous. It's crazy. Especially if you don't have a team. Like if you have a team, it can be like, yeah, you need a team for sure. And these days, that's probably one of the biggest problems is I don't have an assistant. So, yeah, but even then I still need an editing team for the podcast. But anyways, I asked one last question,