Luke Leaman - Energy Balance The Ketogenic Diet Ep 101

# Luke Leaman - Energy Balance The Ketogenic Diet Ep 101

**Channel:** Under The Bar
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

approaching the wormhole yes aka the wizard sleeve The thrusters are going out for me. Oh, yeah. Let's get the hell out of here. Let's do it. And flight mode. Okay. There we go. Put it on cruise control, Tommy. Sit back. Millennium Noggin is in the air, blasting across the universe, and we actually have an in-studio in Millennium in Noggin guest today, the very big, in all senses of the word, Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds. Well, didn't he say he's lost his gorilla suit? Yeah. Because he has, when you say a big dude, like I remember him, and I think we spoke about this, I think it was the Biosig in Arizona, whatever year it was, 2012, 13 or something, where it was the media of the minds, Everyone was there at Charlie Boy's at Biosig, and Lehman and Nick Mitchell were just jacked off their heads. They just looked ginormous, and that was the first time I actually had come across Luke. And I was like, who's that guy, man? He's massive. But shadow of his former self these days, but still there's a fair bit of meat there, isn't there? But there's just so much energy coming off him. When we spoke to him, it was hard to just maintain an equilibrium. He came in here all guns blazing. Fantastic conversation. And today, Rawdon, we're going to cover a few topics with Luke. We're going to talk about energy balance. And we have sort of explored this with Dan Garner and a few other people in the past. We'll get Luke's spin on things about the other factors outside of calories in, calories out that can influence the overall energy balance. Luke takes a nice little angle when he talks not just about the assimilation of nutrients, but what's actually been utilised in the mitochondria of the cell, he's just starting to open the door into this mitochondrial function as a... The crab cycle, I think we know what it is. ...as somewhere where the industry will start to move towards in the future, which I thought was very interesting. And then also we talk about the ketogenic diet. And he also talks about his development through the industry and... Fascinating. ...his philosophies on things. So Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds, really excited to have him on the show. And we had all the bells and whistles. Oh, yeah. When we were measuring ketones, beta-hydroxybutyrate, the blood samples given. Yes. It was like you had a, you know when you roll out your knives when you're about to kill someone, you rolled out all these little packs and these little leather cases, opened them up, and there were all sorts of monitors. And I think you were, I think I came through okay, but your blood sugar was a little bit high. You put it down for coffee. I think your blood sugar was a little high as well. No, it was quite fine, I'm pretty sure. But interestingly, yours was a little up. It was. And we thought it might have been the coffee that you were mucking around because they say that will affect blood sugar levels or insulin levels. Well, it can induce a low-level stress response. So there are some stress hormones floating around. Mobilize some glucose. Mobilize some energy and maybe some glucose in the bloodstream, and that would explain that. That's what I'm saying, telling myself anyway. Excellent. So Luke Lemon from Muscle Nerds coming up very shortly. Rawdon, later next month, so March, we've got the Arnold Sports Festival. You'll be down in Melbourne. Roderick Chavez, the evil genius, is coming down to Australia. He'll be in Melbourne for that. And we thought while he's here, we may as well spend some time with him in some sort of quirky environment. We'll be foolish not to, Tommy, but that's what we thought. And I think we have got a couple of really cool and air quote quirky venues. So it should be a lot of fun. I think the first will be kicking off in Melbourne on the 15th I think Tommy yes Friday the 15th in Melbourne and then we go up to Sydney for the Friday the 22nd of March yep and I also will just mention that we actually Brods and I will fly over to Perth thanks to Richard Collins physique code We going to do a little cameo over there for the day Wednesday the 20th, I think it is, and then we're back in Sydney, like you said, for our Evil Genius Australia tour on the Friday. So a busy week for all of us, but super excited with that one. So the concept for the seminar, Rawdon, is vectors of sports performance. If you've listened to the last episode, we had with Brods, between the three of us, we said vector probably seven to eight times. It was vectoring hard. That was the word of the day. And so we've created a seminar, Vectors of Sports Performance. We're looking at strength development, the role of muscle mass, probably fitness, sports psychology, the role of sports pharmacopoeia and how it influences all of these things, nutrition, programming. And we're going to do our best. No, we will. we will keep Broads on the straight and narrow straight and narrow, yeah right Broads on the straight and narrow, that's funny but that's going to be our role so it will be yourself, myself up there moderating the day and then keeping Broads on track but really excited with the topics he's going to cover and each section will be thoroughly probed covering all dotting I's and crossing T's with each of those plus we're also going to have I think, you know, other considerations and genetics will fall in there and we'll discuss the role of that. I'm sure that's going to play a big role as well. Certainly for anyone that does work with athletes, super, super important for you guys and girls, but I'm sure a lot of it you'll be able to transfer over to Gem Pop and anyone that's after a bit of performance in their hypertrophy training or strength training. So really excited for that one. So you can go to Evil Genius Worldwide to get tickets for that. There are early bird specials on at the moment. You can get the tickets for $150. we want to keep it small so we're limiting to like 30 odd there'll be some pre-seminar content that'll come through there'll be at least an hour of good quality sectioned audio to set the stage for what you'll be learning on the day evilgeniusworldwide.com if you'd like to get those tickets for Melbourne and Sydney yeah and we'll mention that Sabito all things pernickle, Sabito will be on board with samples of his EAAs and other products there and we've also got Carlo from Food for Fitness have actually come on board and they're going to provide the meals for the day. So super excited about that. I have sampled and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will have taken advantage of the Food for Fitness meals. And every attendee will get a discount code as well. So you'll be able to get discounted meals thereafter from Food for Fitness, which is a Sydney-based company. But we're going to see if logistically they can get it down because they are frozen meals and we'll heat them up on the day. But we're going to try and get them down to Melbourne as well, all things being equal. So super, super excited for that. Very exciting stuff. we've got Luke Lehman coming up shortly Rawdon you're back on the tools if someone would like to work with you either online or face to face how do they get in contact yeah I am doing a little bit of face to face PT I can take on a couple more sessions there so if they do want to get me to crack the whip and you know and they can get to the Lift Performance Centre out at Redfern I'm happy to work with them in that regard but yeah online coaching obviously for physique prep or any body composition change there after but really really simple thejewelmethod.com if you want to shoot me an email direct or on any of my Instagram, social media outlets, so Instagram and Facebook, the Dubai Method, you can message me there. Awesome. And what about yourself, man? What do you do? Yeah, you can go to tomhewitt.com.au to check out various things. I think on that website at the moment, it's basically all about PT mentoring. I have a sort of a fairly structured three-session little mentoring program, which is designed to be interactive. so we sort of do it on you as we go through the content. Do it on them. Let me just get this picture. Oh, yeah, very appropriate. Very good. Those kind of notes that you make. And then, yeah, satellite or online coaching, that kind of stuff is available as well. So, yeah, tomhewitt.com.au. Cam, if you could hit us with some sort of noggin sting. rawdon before we get to luke lehman very very tragic news absolutely a close colleague of ours brad soper has died and i don't know it was a real shock when it came through but absolutely then if it wasn't bad enough that someone like soaps that young would would die in pretty freakish and tragic circumstances the spilling of that across mainstream media and social media has certainly been equally tragic Yeah and I think that's really a tough pill to swallow for everyone that knew Brad and you know the media is reporting it as some sort of house invasion gone wrong and you know the house invader sort of got what he deserved type thing And that was what the people that knew nothing of him were sort of writing on his social media wall on Instagram and Facebook, I think. And that, for a lot of us that know Brad, was really, really tough to sort of see. and quite a few got on social media and reached out and said, you know, this is just ridiculous. You don't know the guy and it's completely out of character. And, you know, I guess we'll find out in time, hopefully, what actually happened. But, yeah, absolutely tragic that he lost his life. And really young, I didn't know, I think early 30s, early mid-30s Soaps was. And from the outside looking in, it looks like, you know, that it was some sort of mental illness or issues going on and that's the tragedy of it all. It sounds like it was just almost like a breakdown for him and it ended up with him losing his life, which is absolutely horrific. Clearly he wasn't in his right mind. We've spoken about genetics in terms of sports performance and all kinds of stuff in this program, but there is genetic predispositions to mental illness and I know Brad had sort of battled with a few of these issues in the past and then a confluence of circumstances in life have led him to a point where he clearly was not in his right mind and he found himself in a very unfortunate, vulnerable circumstances and the worst thing that could have happened happened. And I think, I mean, social media is just such a bizarre thing. It has this strange, almost infantilizing effect on grown adults where they start behaving like children in a playground slinging mud. And they would never, never say the things they put online in context of being in front of another human being. No, they wouldn't. They wouldn't. And the thing is, back in the day, there was just no outlet for this. But social media makes it so easy for people to pass judgment and write comments. And it's somehow empowering when they do it. it's it's an acceptable you know it's it's absolutely crazy but uh but what we want to do today is um is actually you know reminisce on some of the amazing things that that we do remember with brad and we had the and and you know i would 100 say much like others you know the poliquin uh you know broderick the handsome ones of the world brad is up there as well to have heavily influenced what i've done over the years and yes you know for me what i take most away from brad and anyone that knows Brad, has there anyone that's seen Brad train? Like Andy Bell sort of comes, I would put him in a similar but different, Andy's more like from a bodybuilding perspective, but I've never seen anyone apply themselves so, engross themselves so deeply into a session and see the look in his eyes when he's finished that set. And for me, I often struggle to get in the head space to train and do all that sort of stuff. And I'd often use Brad as a vehicle to motivate me somewhat, being obviously quite a bit older than him, but I'd be sort of inspired, if you will, by Brad's tenacity and this manic sort of intensity that he would bring to his training sessions. And I mean, every training session was like that. And he was so passionate about strength and conditioning. And I know he's mentored by Woodsky, Derek Woodsky, obviously an amazing strength, arguably one of the best in the world. but he lived and breathed strength and conditioning and really went off he really found his passion and direction in the PT world and I think that evolved like obviously he did have those was driven in that regard for strength and performance but under the clean health with the rest of us he managed to hone that craft and I think he really found his direction and then evolved in that and really established himself I think as a legitimately credible strength and conditioning coach and was getting amazing results with a lot of athletes that he came into touch with and mentored a ton. I've seen so many people come out and say, yeah, Brad was doing this with me, doing that with me. So he was almost at the pinnacle of his... The peak of his powers. The peak of his powers, yeah. And to see him lose all that, like you said, just an unfortunate chain of events, It's just tragic, man. You mentioned Andy Bell, and he's probably, people I've seen in the flesh, Andy Bell probably can tolerate volume better than anyone I've seen. Brad Soper had work capacity that I had never seen in the flesh. His ability to lift incredibly heavy loads over and over again in the context of a strongman challenge was just freakish His work capacity was unbelievable Yeah and you made good times back at the And I actually had the pleasure of working with him at the performance center there for a duration after I left the CHPC. But you recall just being with soaps on the floor. And he was always there first thing in the morning with Greg. And he certainly did the hard yards. And, you know, it was great to work alongside him because he did lift me up when I was on the floor. Yeah. Doing what I did with my clientele. Yeah. I used to, I'd love being on the floor with Brad. Much like yourself, Rodan, it would be, I would use, like, say I had a client and we were doing, you know, their first phase of relative strength training or something. I could always say, hey, Soaps, I'm just sort of, you know, working with such and such. We're developing the nervous system. You know, what are your thoughts on that? And he would chuck in and he'd come out with this great new perspective. and I thought it would add great value to my product that I could pull in people like myself or Brad to enhance the experience of my clients. And soaps was always so much fun. You'd always have fun with Brad. You could tell from his rugby league background that he would be great to be on your team. Yeah, he'd have your back. There was that period where he was actually the PT manager at Clean Health. Yeah, at the end there, definitely. And the staff meetings. Oh, my God. He gave these speeches like it was a halftime rev up for a grand final footy match or something like that. I think they were like sort of fist pumps in their hair. Fist pumps in his hair. And just like F-bombs left, right and center. But that was Brad. Like zero. That was Brad. There was one in particular that made me laugh for days afterwards. There was an issue with not the coaches packing away their stuff, but clients of coaches leaving stuff out. And Brad was there and he was saying, you've got to get your clients to put your shit away. and if you see someone else's client leaving their shit out, tell them to put the shit away. I mean, how would they like it if we were staying at your client's house and we went into the kitchen and pulled out all their pots and pans and they just left their shit out? Yeah, I think I remember that one as well. Hilarious. It was, because I would sort of say to, now soaps, this is your response, as club manager, I say your responsibility, you've got to get the team to put their stuff away. I'm not going to deal with it. So then he took the reins and addressed the guys and, you know, but it was so much, like you said, a half time, I could just imagine in the locker rooms and pacing back and forth. Yeah, man, it's an absolute pleasure to have him touch my life the way he has. It'll be a loss not having him around and not get to see what amazing things he has done, but go on to bigger and greater things in the industry. It's quite sad. On a personal note, I'd like to just send best wishes to Paul Stevenson from Physique Wise. he was you know Paul's a good friend and colleague and client of yours and mine Rawdon and I know he'd been working and mentored with Brad very closely they'd done some seminars together I know they had plans for this year I'm sure Paulie's taking it pretty hard so best wishes to you Paulie and for all the other guys in the same way Dan O'Neill as well and I know they were very close so yeah it's a sad and tragic time Luke Lehman from Muscle Nerds No! No! Well, here he is, Luke Lehman. I really appreciate you coming down into the studio. And now I understand why you insisted upon doing it. There is a difference in the energy between the computer screen The energy balance between all three of us, Tom. Yes, absolutely. Exactly. A long time coming, Tommy. Yeah, absolutely. We've been a bit sloppy, but we had to wait to get him into the studio. So he's here now. It happens in the right time and the right way. So it's very easy to say that energy balance is the be-all, end-all, or the prerequisite for any dietary strategy. But within that concept, there are many factors that can contribute to how relative that concept actually is, Luke. Absolutely. So look, at the end of the day, you can't make something out of nothing. We know that. So calories in versus calories out, that is key. However, what people have to realize is that when you look at the calories in portion and the calories out portion, there's a lot of factors that go into that. And if you just look at the calories in, once you swallow food, that doesn't necessarily mean it's getting into circulation. There's a lot of issues that can be had with digestion assimilation. And people don't think about this. And they swallow food, they don't think what's really actually happening here and am I am I getting all this into my body because the alimentary canal from your mouth to your anus is just it's a tube okay and it has skin in it just like the skin on the outside of your body and that skin keeps some things in it keeps some things out and that's how it protects you so you know if you run a uh you can run a

a fecal sample and look at people's what's coming out of people's butts and you can see that people are shitting out fat shitting out carbs shitting out protein and then you know there's a lot of stuff with the microbiome and i don't get into that too much because the science is changing what what we used to know about that even last year i've pulled all of that stuff out of our muscle in our seminars because it's just it's too hard you really need an expert that knows what they're talking about but at the end of the day people need to be aware of that right so things like stress stress can alter how you digest and assimilate things and if people don't think about the fact that assimilation doesn't end when it gets in your body. It still has to be able to get into the cell and then it has to get into the mitochondria and that's where all the magic happens. Interesting. So in a summary of that, it's you may think you're eating 1200 calories, but it may in fact be far, far less than that. Absolutely. We had a student that came to one of our seminars in Perth. He was eating 7,000 calories and couldn't gain weight. Okay. So we ran some biometrics. We looked at his blood pressure. We looked at his heart rate. We looked his hrv started training with us we added a digestive uh proprietary blend from foreign and he's on 2500 calories start putting weight on you know basically he's just wasting money by just shitting all his food out interesting so it can go the other way as well where you know because i mean look in my world where i am pushing calories into some individuals to to to grow yeah like it's like you shouldn't need this many calories but we'll keep going and that's with you know digestive enzymes and clean food and and all that type of stuff so yeah i think it's probably more widespread than what we comprehend yeah okay so we go food goes into your mouth then you try and out the anus and out the anus and in between whence there'll be various amounts of assimilation and then you alluded to the mitochondria which is another source where there could be a leak of energy yeah absolutely so the majority of this what we probably should talking about is like vitamins and minerals a vitamins minerals and also stress right and then training too so if we're big on keeping your aerobic anaerobic systems balanced out and if you look at the majority you've got these guys the hashtag fuck cardio crowd they're fucking morons like they're not understanding this and this is why you see people dying in their 50s or having renal issues in their 50s not just because of the drugs it's because they're not actually taking care of their mitochondria and they're aging rapidly and that you're if your mitochondria start becoming dysfunctional, you age rapidly and you move, I don't want to say disease, but more to dis-ease, right? Because your mitochondria is where you make a lot of the things you need to repair, right? So you're looking at things like B vitamins, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, B12. You need these to make all of these bioenergetics work properly. You need magnesium, you need zinc, you need manganese, you need copper. There's a ton of stuff you need. And this is what kills me. People are talking about all these different diets and training and drugs and all this, and nobody's taking a fucking multivitamin. That's the easiest insurance you have is to take a really good multivitamin, multimineral, to assure that you're getting this stuff in. And then above and beyond that, we will typically give somebody a digestive enzyme. Because, again, if you have dysfunctional mitochondria, you're not making gastric juices like you should, so you're not going to be able to break down and digest things well. Okay, so we will, when we first start training people, we'll more often than not put them on some type of synergistic blend that takes care of the stomach and the small intestine and the colon and all this stuff. When they start digesting better, prettier poop, faster digestion times, then we'll pull them off of that stuff. And then everything works fairly easily. Interesting. And have you taken the time to, I'm sure you would have, but I'll ask it anyway. So someone comes in, like that 7,000-calorie scenario, tests the stool, see all the stuff in the stool, change things up, test the stool again, and see, like you said, a prettier-looking stool. Have you actually gone to that length with some individuals? Not really anymore because I'm now of the opinion that you shouldn't run tests unless you absolutely need to. I mean, it's just extra money. I know people in Australia that run $5,000 worth of fucking tests when you could probably just sit down and interview them for 90 minutes and figure all their shit out. For sure. And if you can't figure it out within the first three or four months, then it's probably out of your pay grade anyways, and you should probably refer out. And so now we have other people run tests. The tests that I'll typically run if I need to, I'll run a biochemistry panel, so I'll run bloods, and I'll run organic acids tests. And that pretty much gives me everything I need to know, especially with nutrient deficiencies. And organic acids, you want to just elaborate? I think most of our listeners will be familiar with blood work, but organic acids is urine or? It's basically looking at metabolites of metabolism. So it's a urinary test. So there's some things you have to do, like not eating certain foods for a few days. You pee in a cup and then you send it off. And basically it's measuring what's high and low as far as metabolism, pyruvate, lactate, what's happening in the electron transport chain and the mitochondria. And you can see a lot of things on there whereas man this guy might have a thiamine deficiency so maybe we give him some B1 Boom it an easy fix but I rarely even do that anymore unless people will come to me with a lot of labs and I just kind of look at their labs and give it a look over and say okay, you know, this stuff is pretty easy to fix. Here you go. Here's a broad-spectrum multivitamin, multimineral, and we're going to do a little bit more aerobic, and we're going to cut down on the HIIT training. You know, the majority of the people that come to us are so out of balance with how their bioenergetics is flowing is that they get winded walking up a flight of stairs and their legs are on fire walking up a flight of stairs, which to me is ridiculous. So a lot of the testing we do now is, is there testing I can do or that the client can do at home that's repeatable daily and weekly without having to go to a lab and spend a lot of money? So we utilize waking heart rate, waking HRV, blood pressure, and we look at things like, if they can, the fasting lactate that we were talking about off air earlier. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I also run the, and through spending time with Broderick, he has his list of things that he will get periodically, like weekly certain measures, every month certain measures, every three months, et cetera, et cetera. And I do run the four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, they send the BP, the report that they submit at the end of the week, and heart rate. And one that Ty Phillips, I think you would know Ty. You obviously know Ty and a lot of our listeners know Ty. Awesome kid. highly stressed environment sort of was moving out of a somewhat of a toxic household where he's at blood pressure was up around 150 on 90 borderline hypertension and so I'm like okay we've got to get this looked at and and he manages his he's pretty savvy he's not like an idiot he's well versed in the functional medicine side of things and and he was having various meditation practices and obviously all the supplementation, so the digestive enzymes and everything else. So imagine all that was being done. But all he changed was his living environment. And he is a bit of a stress head. I mean, I will say that on air, and he'll probably agree. But anyway, changed that. So I was looking at sending him to the GP to actually medicate while he was doing this prep. Listener Pearl, I think, not telling our listeners. I mean, it's obviously through a doctor anyway. It wasn't like I was saying, just treat yourself, go in, check the blood pressure if it's high, suggest this, because it has, I think, the least amount of concerns from a training perspective, but bring BP down while he's doing this particular prep. And long story short, moved, settled into a new environment, blood pressure came down. Yeah. So it went from what? Like, that was just stress, dude. So looking at it, I mean, I wouldn't have known. And then also, coincidentally, body comp, body fat's falling off him now. Like, as soon as the stress came down, and I could only gauge that by fundamentally his blood pressure and heart rate, and they both came down, and lo and behold, the body calm started improving, and productivity went up, his training numbers came up in the gym, and everyone lives happily ever after. So, yeah, stress is amazing because it's invisible. I mean, how do we know you're stressed? The thing is your brain will keep you from feeling stressed. If you have long-term chronic stress, the brain is going to do everything it can to save itself. So more often than not, when I have somebody come in and we do the first interview, they're like, hey, how's your stress? I don't feel stressed. And then an hour later, they're crying and dry heaving and they're talking about how they hate everything in their life. And I'm like, I thought you weren't stressed. All right, cool. Let's work on that first. And even what you said the other week there, like you more than – I mean you know Tom's known for his ability to manage lifestyle. and you do consults to address others' lifestyles and set up their lifestyle and they always... But you found yourself that even what you were doing wasn't enough. I spent a few days up on the coast and just totally unwound and it was the trip back to Sydney, I could literally feel the physiology changing. I was like, the memory or the association with just my life in Sydney is triggering a physiological response, which I've just grown accustomed to and lived with. I think what you're saying, Luke, is the body adapts to the stresses that you place on it. I mean, we started with energy balance, but this is perfect to segue into lifestyle management and stress management. And I know the muscle nerds is famous for least mode. I mean, that's been thrown around out there. So Tommy and I were curious as to finding out what this is all about. And a couple of questions that I'll throw to you is, from a training perspective, how do we know if they're doing too much? How do you quantify that? And also, are we supposed to be sympathetic, parasympathetic, and never any between? Or do you find that we sort of fluctuate throughout the day and that's healthy? It's when we spend too much in a sympathetic state and we're running on adrenaline and we never go into parasympathetic that it becomes problematic. Because if there's not a little bit of sympathetic, I don't get out of bed. You know what I mean? I'm just in, ah, there's no urgency. Eh, I'll aim for a little bit longer. But we've got Luke Lehman coming to the studio. and then I walking in efficiently So let explore that side of things Yeah so look the default mode for humans is a parasympathetic state That where you supposed to be the majority of the time But without a sympathetic state you don have a reason to adapt. So this is why we train. We don't have that in our lives anymore. We're not hunting or gathering or fighting off saber-toothed tigers or other people anymore, right? So, you know, that hour you have, you know, whether it's three, five, seven days a week, that's your time to go and push yourself into that. But unfortunately, you know, over the last 20, 20 years or so, you know, we've got the internet, social media and career, career, career. People are away from like family. It's all about career and like killing yourself to try to provide a better life for your family and trying to get ahead and comparing yourself to everyone else. So we live in this toxic, weird, artificial state that now we have to do things to counteract what we're doing to ourselves with things like career and toxic relationships and living in, you know, a place like Sydney, which is like hustle bustle and noisy and EMF and all this stuff. So that's what people aren't aren't understanding. When you look at now, it's 2018, right? And we're training like people trained in the 60s and 70s, like really high volume and cutting the calories, but we can't train like that anymore. Unless if you go to, you know, move to Southern California, and you're able to sit on the beach or move to San Diego and all you do all day is train and eat and sleep and shit, then you're probably pretty good. But that's not realistic for the majority of the people, especially for the jump on stage, because that's not going to pay your bills. You still have to have a job and all this other stuff and manage your social media and manage all the other stuff in your life. So people have an issue just doing nothing. In the past, we could just sit under a tree and watch the grass grow And for whatever reason, we can't do that anymore because you're going to sit under the tree and you're going to search social media or think of something else. And people have a really hard time relaxing. And we had a lot of clients where the first thing we tell them to do is you need to take a fucking holiday. You need to take a holiday and you need to leave your computer and your phone at home and just go to the beach. And I'm the worst at this. But you just go to Fiji or you go somewhere and you just sit on the beach and you do fuck all but get drunk, I don't know, wank and do whatever else you do on vacation, have sex or whatever. So, you know, and do absolutely nothing. But the problem is, as you can see, you go off on holiday and you feel great. Your HRV climbs, you're able to get like rest, relaxation. You could probably drink 20 beers a day and get leaner by doing that. And but then you've got to come back to reality at some point. So what I like is I like teaching people visualization, right? So like really, really hammering and getting a mental image of where you were on that beach or on a mountain or whatever. And instead of just meditating, try to take yourself back to that spot. We find that works really good for people because people are in a meditation now, but they're doing a lot of guided meditation, which I love, but they're just trying to sit there and they think that meditation is sitting there thinking about nothing, but that's not actually technically true. Visualization works a lot better in conjunction with the meditation to bring you back and bring your stress levels back down. Yeah, because the visualization actually triggers an emotional response. if you're clear enough with the visualization, you can pick yourself back at that beach or whatever it is and notice all of the sights and sounds and the smells and things that you experience. Feet up, sunset in the background. Grass thongs on. Sand in your crotch. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. And it does trigger an emotional response. And if you do it a few times, you can call on it quickly in a stressful situation or in between meetings or whatever. You can just go back there, bring it up, feel the wellness and move on. Yeah, absolutely. so for our listeners that um okay we sort of painted a picture that most of us are probably uh and and for our listeners that aren't aware quick overview of sympathetic parasympathetic for them okay so we've got your autonomic nervous system which basically what people refer to as fight or flight and then you know rest and restore where i like the fucking and feeding that's what i like for parasympathetic yeah and um you know we're supposed that the sympathetic state is there for survival. We're not supposed to live in at 24, 365, right? But that's what people are doing. So when you get in a fight or flight state, your body's wanting to make fast energy. So the oxidation rates of sugar and fat kind of go down and you get stuck in what's called fast glycolysis, where you're making a lot of really fast energy, but you're not making a whole lot of it really quickly. And so you get to the point where if this happens for a long enough time, people start getting really fatigued. They start getting mitochondrial issues and the mitochondria start to get dysfunctional, they start to die off, and then you start having a harder and harder time actually processing your foods and making testosterone and making female sex hormones and making thyroid and making all this stuff that you need, right? So, and you see it when people diet for a long time, all their hormones crash. That's a completely normal, natural thing, especially if you're doing it to the point where you're getting to a natural level of leanness, that is expected. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, okay, a really, really good synopsis of everything going on there how do they know whether they spending too much time in the other than a general look you probably are How do do they tell tell science that they in that uh sympathetic world and they not having enough parasympathetic so you've got look you've got subjective is good and you know an objective measurement so so subjective is how do i feel objective is what are the numbers quantifiable data so the first thing that's going to go up is going to be your heart rate so if you're resting heart rate or you're waking we like waking heart rate because you you haven't gotten out of bed you haven't stubbed your toe on something you haven't screamed at your kid you know you you there's nothing that should have falsely elevated your heart rate so that that's before you rub one out you wouldn't that's before yeah you don't want to rub one out because that's going to jack up your yeah damn mine's always like 120 and i can't put it yeah like our our morning routine is we have clients and this is you know there's a compliancy issue too so you have to work on this like my ideal thing if somebody wakes up they put on the blood pressure cuff we use the omron bp 7000 we put that on put your chest strap on put it on elite hrv and within three minutes you have your blood pressure heart rate and your hrv you go take a shit in the piss or whatever you do and then maybe for some clients they take fasting blood sugar you know we we try to get them to do as much as we can but you don't want to over complicate things if you over complicate then they do nothing yeah but as we see what the trends are over time and the majority of the people that come to us they're hyper tense stage one or stage two or higher so we've got guys we were sitting in a seminar in london and we had 60 people in the class and only three people had gold like world club gold standard gold standard that's the one like thank you only three people had gold standard blood pressure and it was me and two other guys and the two other guys if you want me to ask 115 over 75 it's gold standard if you hit 120 over 80 that's pre-hypertension yeah you used to be gold standard but now it's that They did. They did. And the thing is, Dr. Alex Vasquez has been talking about 115 over 75 for years and the research is there. The problem is that it takes around 15 to 17 years for research to actually start being used. And then it takes roughly 30 years for them to start teaching in medical school. So if you look at like all of the new research is coming out, unless you read the research, you don't even know what's going on. Like you're well behind the curve if you're using old numbers and things. But like the American Medical Association just lowered the heart rate to 120 over 80. If you're above that, that's already indicative of issues. So our goal is during the prepping to prep is to get them to a good blood pressure, get their heart rate down into the 50s, get their HRV somewhere in like the 70s, maybe 80s, somewhere around there, even high 60s. Once they're there, now we're ready to beast mode. So it's a continuum. So that is least mode? Yes. So it's a least mode to beast mode continuum. them. So what we found is that people are beasting themselves all the time. They're not taking time to actually recover. And what ends up happening is they just, if they're not getting results, they just keep adding more training, adding more training, and they just get worse and worse and worse. And they come to us and they're like, Hey, I've got all these labs. I've been through seven doctors. No one can help me. My hair is falling out. You know, I don't know what's going on. I'm freezing cold all the time. And then you look at it and you're like, fuck man, have you tried like taking the foot off the gas pedal lately? And they're like, no, no, you got to work harder and then take more food out. No, let's this obviously not fucking working for you. So why don't we do the opposite and give you more food, do a little less work for, you know, six to eight weeks, get you in a good, healthy position. Now we get off the lease boat and go into beasting you. So, and then it'd be a more traditional, what, what our listeners are probably more familiar with that style of beast mode. Yeah. There's like, you know, go fucking prowler sprints and, you know, drop sets and every intensifier known to man and bands and chains and all this shit, you know, which most people don't need anyways. Um, different topic, different topic. So do you find six to eight weeks is the time frame that you usually find to rectify? Yeah, it takes roughly, you know, when you start doing more cardiovascular respiratory training, it takes about four weeks to really start seeing the, like, that's like the big hammer when you really see everything drop. Like your heart rate drop, your blood pressure drop, your HRV might climb a little bit. And then around six to eight weeks, you're basically starting to, if you've hammered it really well for those two blocks of training, you're pretty much getting to the peak. Like you're not really going to get anything out of that. So then we move out of that phase into a specific phase. So when I program, I look at traditional athletic training. You've got a GPP, general preparedness, and you've got specific preparedness SPP. So the least mode prepping to prep stuff is your GPP. We get you ready. Okay, cool. Now we're going to give you GVT. We're going to give you Milos Arcev giant sets. Now we're going to fucking hammer your dick in the dirt because now you're in a good state where you can actually get something out of it. Whereas you go into most gyms and the trainer doesn't even do an assessment. they just fucking let's go do drop sets yeah you know fascinating yeah look I think it's very interesting the point you made about the way we train now compared to what they would have done in the 60s and the change in lifestyle around that because you can once you've trained for a while you can inflict a lot of damage on yourself in a 40 minute period and if you do that consistently over time it's just driving you into the ground with big

Dick into the dirt. Dick into the dirt. Get out in the back of a t-shirt. And I think it's worth noting that in these classes where you've got the only two people who weren't pre-hypertensive, we're talking about a room of primarily trainers with good body composition, reasonable diet, and the rest of it, I'm assuming. Yeah, I mean, when you go into these classes, everybody looks like they should be super healthy. Yeah. But then you've got guys in there with 210 systolic blood pressure and guys at 190. And that's, I mean, that's, those are a couple of outliers, but the majority of people in 140, 150s, that's not good. I mean, that's, that's terrible. If you look at 69, 68% of all mortality with cardiovascular disease happens between 120 and 140. So now you say, okay, well, what about 150, 160, 190 to 10? And they just don't, they're like, yeah, fuck it. You know, I'm strong. I'm fucking 6% body fat. You know, who cares? and then they keep doing this and five years later their hair is falling out, they can't get an erection, they've lost their period, and they can't take a solid shit. But at least they can deadlift 300 kilos, so that's good. And then the pressure that they'll be putting on that, God, I can't even fathom how high their BP must be going. If it starts at 210 and they're pulling 300, it must be 1,000 on 500 or something. Or you get somebody, what's one of the best pieces of equipment to build really good quads? Leg press. Leg press, and that works for most people. My quads don't grow when I front squat and back squat, but they grow really well when I've got really long levers, so leg press works really well. And so you get on there, resolve a maneuver, guess where your fucking blood pressure's going. If your face is turning purple while you're doing it, I mean, come on. Think about what's the long-term issues when you look at the endothelial lining and you start looking at plaquing and things like that. That's when we slip in a little five megs of Tadalafil a day and just ease those blood vessels up. But that's a topic that Luke and I will discuss another time. man all right that's a really good overview of lease mode i love it mate we're a little bit in reverse here but how was the the track the evolution of your career within the industry because i gather there was a time where you were very much a beast mode and ticking all the boxes that you've just described here yeah you know what look yeah we're all young and dumb and full of cum at one point right now i'm just old and i cum dust so you know in my 20s and in my early 30s i was you know i was in kind of that poliquin headspace where he is uh you can't do cardio it makes you fat and i'll just jump in there i'll do say look if you google uh lumen at lehman uh you'll see him come up with uh nick and he's jacked off his head you're just saying with god look at the size of luke and and uh credit where credit's due um nick's uh he's he's massive as well like it was just that period of time back then he was so massive like scary massive and shredded yeah just big yeah but you look massive too because i was going who's this dude man that was the first time i actually saw you yeah yeah that was a good time that was in uh arizona we were teaching biosec i gather it was like an iconic biosec it was like one of the best of all time it really was it was it was a hell of a class um and going in and training with those guys with derek whiskey and charles and and nick was awesome and yeah i did a leg training session with with nick and i couldn't stand up straight for like two days it was just horrendous but uh anyway that piece mate continue so yeah look i i grew up in that i grew up as a strength athlete i did the discus and the shot put powerlift i started the powerlifting team in my high school i kept powerlifting after high school and then you know got tired of all the people wearing the supportive gear so i went into bodybuilding and mainly physique you know before physique was even a category um but uh yeah i was i didn't give a shit about health i i was squatting 700 pounds i was deadlifting benching close to 500 i didn't give a shit i was fast you know i look great and And then, you know, that works for you in your 20s. And then you get to about 35 and you go, oh, man, stuff's starting to fall apart. What the hell's going on? You know, I thought I had it all figured out. Then I started studying Joel Jamison's stuff, Alex Vasquez's stuff, Dr. Brian Walsh's stuff. And I went, okay, like, if I want longevity and to last a long time and I got more into anti-aging, you know, I'm going to have to figure something out. So I started getting into, well, let's look at different types of conditioning. Like, we have different strength qualities and you do a certain strength quality for a certain adaptation. well is what is cardio is cardio cardio and it's not like doing different types of conditioning elicits a different response and that can be bonded in with your strength training to create a full system and every adaptation should build on the next phase and so i started getting into that when i decided i didn't have to try to be the you know facading all the time trying to be the silverback gorilla you know 270 pound alpha male wannabe you know so i kind of got over that stuff I learned how to have empathy and I learned how to actually talk to people and was that always when muscle nerds came in fruition because way way way back in the day you actually we actually connected it's like hey man I'm doing this muscle nerd thing you know I gonna come to Sydney and it didn come into fruition but I think the stars went aligned but was that always the philosophy of Muscle Nerds or did that Muscle Nerds sort of evolve over time to what it is today No, so what happened was Zoe, when I met my wife, she quit both of her jobs. We had one date, one four-day date. Two and a half months later, she quit both of her jobs, sold her car, and she flew to America. And then, not just a few weeks after that, I found myself jobless as well. and then I also you know I was about to leave that job anyways because my my philosophies and my ideas were not lined up with theirs and I was like man there's too many people teaching performance not enough people teaching health and no one's teaching how to train general population like everything that everyone is teaching is olympics or national level world level pro not and those those things will work on some people if you're training guys in their 20s they work fantastically well if you're training people in their 30s and 40s and 50s they stop working so well they need to be highly modified and so we said okay i you know i've got the performance stuff down um let's teach people how to get healthy right let's teach people anti-aging and longevity and things like that because there was a huge gap in the industry and now there's a lot of other people trying to mimic what we're doing but they're not doing it as well as we are no you seem to be like a few steps ahead of the game i'm always a few steps ahead that's because i i can predict where the industry is going like i started teaching about the mitochondria three and a half years ago and that'll be the new thing there's probably be mlm companies with you know like keto os but the mitochondria supplements and all this and you know but i study probably 20 to 30 hours a week yeah that's crazy man like you and you're always uh on a plane somewhere doing another course somewhere like um it's like you you you're finally i think like next year predicted you can stay closer to home a little bit not yet no it sucks it's if people think it's a glamorous life you know that oh you get to go to all these places i get to go to all these places deal with jet lag and never leave the hotel really you know it's not really a fun lifestyle and zoe occasionally comes but most of the time she hates the travel so she will we traveled two years non-stop the because we couldn't stay in one country more than three months together until i finally got my visa for australia and so now we're here so hopefully for good yeah we'll see and of course you don't get to see daisy that's it yeah and you know that's a that just that it just crushes my heart not to see her but it's always good about sending lots of pictures and videos tell me luke um do you find that uh as much as you know you sort of said that a lot of people are copying what you're doing is that almost not a blessing but like people are coming to because i remember when i first heard some of your stuff and muscle owners were like whoa this stuff you know and people used to come away from it's like luke's absolutely amazing you sit there till you get at the end of the day but it's you gotta you gotta have your head screwed on if you're hearing this stuff you know um and i think that's you dumbing it down as well like do you find that because we're exposed to a lot more of these concepts when people come now to muscle nerds it's it's an easier educate like that almost that base as long as assuming they haven't been taught really really bad information yeah but that base is so they're getting a little more out of your courses these days yeah they are and you know we we figured out a while back we said okay how do we how do we make these courses better because we teach i mean our level our foundations course is 500 slides in three days right and and it's biochemistry and it's physiology and it's it's some very complicated subjects and we we water it down to the big broad concepts of what they need to know and then what we've done now is we have pre-course material that we've recorded so that if they've done the pre-course material at least they're fairly familiar with the stuff and most of the people that come to our courses come through three or four times because they really want to learn it and i could we could break it down into different levels and we could water it down but we would rather people come back to the full Monty three or four times and really hammer it in and really understand it because it's a game changer when you look at like our program design course with all it's all exercise metabolism chemistry and our foundations courses all basically nutritional biochemistry and stress management things like that if you do those two together it's probably going to put you above 99.9% of the trainers out there that you know they're spending money on TRX fucking certifications goddamn bosu balls certifications instead of actually learning how the body works and uh i talked to luke tolic a lot and he's kind of doing the same thing we are but on a kind of a different level yeah um so he's teaching a lot of physiology just stuff that trainers should fucking already know but they don't and um they don't they they don't spend enough time in their cert three four of learning how the body works so that when you give them a stimulus you know what the adaptation is i can if i'm going to put you on stage i can tell you almost to the degree what weight you're going to be at and what body fat your percentage you're going to be at i can tell you everything because i know the rates of adaptation how fast and slow we can do things and we can nail it every time but if you don't know how the body works you can't really do that you just basically just picking programs just on by random throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and isaac good over in perth Perth there Congratulations He got the win His first show he placed in every category The second one he placed in all but one because they said he was too big for the category. He was too big for fitness. His legs are massive. He never shows them off, but his thighs are fucking massive. He's one of those guys that when you take a close look, he's like, hmm, some muscle there. You sort of skim past him, but then you have a second look. Yeah, well, I mean, we started at 79 kilos, and we took a little over 12 months. We got him up to 79 to 91, and then we pulled him back down to around 81, 82. That's decent, man. Now if I could just get him to do some freaking gear, I'd be happy. Yeah, that's all natural. Yeah, I'd make him a monster if he'd just not be scared of needles. There's always a way. Just keep chipping away. That'd be weird. You know, I think with the physiology and some of the things you're saying there is that the point being is that a lot of trainers are doing things and not actually understanding the rationale behind what's going on. And I think this is where the understanding, you know, Luke Tulloch and yourself, of, you know, these broad strokes of physiology is a starting point, I think, is a very wise idea. Yeah. And I guess the thing is, Luke, it's not necessarily when you think about it, like at first you hear it, it's like, well, that's how it's almost going to practice. Well, it's not really because it's big picture type stuff that when you design that program, you can understand why that program is going to work. A hundred percent. And that's the thing. People are already writing programs so that they should really understand what it does. Like what happens when I give 10 sets of 10 versus this? What if I give you two minutes to rest between sets or 30 seconds? How do I sequence that to then to basically compound the next training phase into the next? Can I write 12 months of training? Our students in our program design class can write out 12 months of training, 12 months of conditioning. They can write out 12 different nutritional setups, and they know how to put the pieces of the puzzle in and some basic supplementation. And why shouldn't people be doing that with GenPop? And I saw a guy post the other day. So we use the Keystone software, which is Travis Jones's. It's really good. It gets so much better every week. They're constantly making updates. And somebody posted in the forum, they're like, hey, are you guys going to make an option where we can write their workout as we're training? and I thought, why isn't their fucking workout already written? You should have months and months. If you've created a plan from A to B, you should already know what the fuck they're going to do 12 months before they're going to do it. That's professional program design, not just like, I'm just going to make shit up. Oh, this looks cool. Let's do this. We could probably get balls deep into program design another time, but I think that was anything else you want to cover on that lifestyle lease mode type thing before we delve into the next couple of topics? Just while we're on this one, you mentioned you're a step ahead of the industry. Where do you think we're going? Well, I think that people really learning about the mitochondria will be next. So like this next year, we're going to teach more mitochondria stuff, right? And then I think it's going to go into the relationship between the immune system and inflammation and how that relates to stress, which we already teach at a basic level. But in our foundation stuff, we teach it really big, broad concepts. And then after you've done that, now we're going to go into the kind of nitty-gritty details of, okay, let's pull some layers back and let's really see how this works in a more detailed fashion once they understand the conceptual stuff. But I think those are the two things. And that's the stuff they need. I think that people are going to start having the hammer dropped on them, like personal trainers who are calling them functional medicine practitioners. I think the governments are going to sort of start dropping hammers on them because you cannot use medicine in your name. Unless you're a fucking doctor. So if you want to be a doctor, fuck, go back to school. But stop, you are not diagnosing or treating disease, which is the definition of medicine, right? So, like, we call our guy, like, functional physiology, right? And integrative personal training. That's the kind of taglines that we made that we tried to trademark and somebody blocked us. But whoever that asshole is, when I find out, I'm going to knock their dick in the dirt. But that's the thing. Like, there's nothing, there's not out of scope of practice to learn how the body works. And if you're teaching people exercise, you should probably know that. It's kind of important. And people need to get better at nutrition because a lot of trainers are out of scope. They're riding sports nutrition, but they don't have any credentials. And, you know, clients now, that's expected. Whether it's legal or not where you live, that's expected. You're not always going to go to a trainer that doesn't ride their nutrition. But they really need to understand the difference between physique nutrition and sports nutrition, right? Because those are two different things. And some of the things I've seen in Australia, I had a girl that was training about 19 to 21 hours AFL, that weird AFL game you guys have. And she was eating. Big in Melbourne. No, big in Melbourne. Yeah, 1,500 calories and like 80 grams of carbs a day. And she was training like 21 hours a day That is ridiculous Tons of injuries you know sugar cravings she bashing out sugar all the time because her brain like ah, I kinda need food. And it was an easy fix. Jump her up to over 3,000 calories, add a bunch of carbs, no more sugar cravings, injuries went away, and now she's dropped a few kilos the first couple of weeks. Awesome. Very cool. All right. Should we move on? We should. Okay, so one of the things we've had on our list for quite a while, Luke, and we've been saving it for you is the ketogenic diet. We're happy to have a discussion around that topic. Absolutely. Man, I love all diets. We can talk about any diet you want. I don't bash any diet. I'm saying, you know, eat the diet that you're going to be able to stick to. Ultimately, consistency is what matters. Consistency over a long time. I'm doing a ketogenic diet right now. And the reason is I just came back from overseas. Every time I do a tour, I get fat. And so the first thing I do is go on a ketogenic diet to increase metabolic flexibility. but it's a short term. I'm not doing this very long. I'm going to do this probably, I might do it to the end of the year. I'll probably right now I'm doing two or three weeks of just a modified ketogenic diet, and then in a few weeks I'll probably add in some cyclical ketogenic dieting. It's the same stuff I teach people. I practice everything I teach. I'll move into targeted ketogenic dieting, and then I'll move to a modified low-carb diet, and then I'll pump my training volume up, and I'll crank my carbs up as high as I can while I'm still able to maintain mitochondrial fluidity and metabolic flexibility. All right. Well, let's delve into a bit of a synopsis or an overview of a keto diet and what it actually involves. So basically, when you're not eating carbs or when you eat very few carbs, your body will start oxidizing fat and creating ketones. And that's to basically fuel your nervous system, your brain. And it's more of like a backup generator type thing. And it's not for everybody. It works fantastically well, especially in the first phases of people's training. But you don't necessarily have to do a traditional ketogenic diet to pump your ketones up. So like right now, I'm eating far more protein and far less fat than most people. But the ketogenic diet originally was made for epileptics because it reduces their seizures. And now they've created the exogenous ketones so that people that are epileptics can actually eat carbs, take the ketones, and keep them from having seizures. So that's great. but people seem to think this is a ketogenic diet it's a relatively new idea fuck's sake i was doing this fucking when i was 18 i was fucking what 23 years ago how old am i no eight whatever it was 20 years ago it was many years ago i mean i was 20 yeah it's 23 years ago i was doing this shit like dandy shane reading body opus had two copies of that sergeant law mcdonald with he had an old website in the 90s that he basically logged everything he did then he wrote the ketogenic diet book and we've got records of the ketogenic diet back to 1862 when William Banting wrote a book on it called Letters on Corpulence. So this is not a new thing. Atkins in the 70s, South Beach Diet in the 90s. So they're all spins on keto style nutrition. It is. It's all spins on keto or, you know, modified low carb dieting. And I think the majority of your general population are probably going to do better on a lower carb diet, but that doesn't mean a no carb diet. And So people think, okay, I'll just cut all my carbs out. Well, what the fuck is going to fuel your training? Because that's your go-juice when it comes to training. And the more volume you do, you're probably going to want to add that back. And I think people are getting crazy with adding in shit tons of fat, and they're not thinking about where the fat's coming from. High circulating levels of fat can cause insulin resistance. The wrong kinds of fats can screw up your prostate gland in production and make you pro-inflammatory. There's a lot of stuff people need to think about. and for me a ketogenic diet for people who train isn't necessarily high fat and it's not low protein um you know because that would be the typical sense it's actually quite low protein super high fat 20 to 25 protein and then the rest fat and quite low veg as well because and that's i mean fuck man you're not you're not eating any veg because you're worried about your carbohydrates and people already don't eat enough veg as it is you can't eat fruit and all that and And people think fruit makes you fat. There's a lot of shit I could just rant on right now. But it's because people don't understand nutrition. Now, do other – I mean, there's always outliers. Do some individuals actually have to have that existence where they can't eat many vegetables and they can't eat too much protein? They have to have that typical stereotypical type keto existence to stay in that state of ketosis? Well, I'll talk about one of my clients in Queensland. She's a state record holder in her for weightlifting. and she came to me because the doctors didn't know what to do with her. She has microscopic colitis, so she's got an autoimmune disease that basically attacks her intestines. So with her, when we first started, she couldn't eat any fiber. Every fiber, she'd be on the toilet and basically diarrhea all day, and the doctor says, oh, you're not going to be able to get rid of this. We can only manage it with some medication and just stop competing because you're just never going to be able to compete again. And then here we are competing.

years later and she's won multiple broker record multiple times and she's now eating stuff she could never eat before avocados and fruits and we still have to be a bit careful but the first year we were pretty much doing a ketogenic style diet and she was having to eat basically baby food she would have to peel all of her veggies and cook them until they were baby food consistency mush and yeah that that helped out a lot you look at people with FODMAP issues and SIBO and things like that yeah they may have to cut that stuff out but it shouldn't be forever if it's forever something's really bad and you got to refer that out to a gut specialist and let them take care of it but oh okay so it doesn't have to be that extreme so what's your version of a like between what parameters can a keto diet look like i mean honestly i've seen people go up to 45 protein and still stay in ketosis and what i mean by that is we're measuring uh bhb blood ketones we're using a ketometer we're watching that and they're still fine like 45 30 35 45 protein the rest in fat and they seem to do just fine but that's taken into account that they're actually training and unfortunately like if we look at like evidence-based research you're not going to find any studies that show the effects of a ketogenic style diet with high protein and moderate fat and training yeah but the only place we have now we have to look at empirical data which is we have to look at the guys in the trenches actually doing it and i know you've done that with some people um and i've done the same thing with saying okay 20 to 25 percent protein is probably not going to be very good for somebody training five days a week with weights or twice a day or even doing the conditioning and all that so we pump the protein up yeah you're going to make some sugar out of that but that's okay because you're burning it off when you train yeah okay um so it really could be and what about carbohydrates you mentioned i mentioned up to 45 percent protein i think i've been up to 200 250 grams of carbohydrates it's still just maintained 1.5 to 2 on the ketometer, but I was training twice a day. So is your general rule of thumb cool? Keto, if it works for you, go through the pros and cons in a second. But it is under the caveat that you're checking that, I think it's beta-hydroxybutyrate in the blood. So you've got a monitor and you're checking that periodically throughout the day? Or is it if you're in there, then you're fine? If your levels are sweet? You know what, I like taking it first thing in the morning on some people, and then we'll do it after their training as well. And you'll see, like, that it's really high after training, especially if they're doing a lot of conditioning. The major stimulus is that your liver is running out of glucose, right? So the easiest way to get the liver to run out of glucose is do aerobics. Easy, right? So, you know, what we might have people do is the first couple of days, they do, you know, a couple hours of aerobics over two or three days, and they're pretty much in ketosis at that point. Right, right, right. Speed up the process. Speed up the process. And I used to use insulin on myself and I almost killed myself a few times. That was when I was young and dumb and full of cum in my early 20s. And I don't touch insulin anymore because I'm scared shitless of it now. Yeah. It's a strange beast that insulin. Yeah. Let's unpack the concept of metabolic flexibility. First of all, what that means and what the benefits downstream of that are. And is that synonymous with the keto style diet? Is that one of the pros? Yeah. Yeah. That and fasting, intermittent fasting or time constrained fasting or alternate day fasting and things like that can all do it. The easiest way to stimulate metabolic flexibility or to improve it is to lower your carbs. And, again, that doesn't mean no carbs. It means lowering carbs down so that you can increase oxidation rates of fat and carbs. So basically saying when I'm at rest, I'm going to burn primarily fat. Well, I'm going to say primarily, but it's about 70% fat, 30% carbohydrate. And when I train, we're flipping that, right? And that's what you want. When you look at the studies on it, the easiest thing to do is fasting. 24-hour fasting can do it, pulling some carbs down low. I wouldn't recommend fasting for most athletes, but chin pop, why not? You know, if they can go 18 to 24 hours without food and not have hypoglycemic episodes, and if that's the case, we can throw in some benfothiamine, throw in some carnitine, some things to re-regulate that. But if you're going hypoglycemic while you're fasting, that's telling me that you're not oxidizing fat well anyways. So you probably need to do that. Need to fast. But it's not a calorie deficit will stimulate metabolic flexibility. what i would recommend is people write your diet for maintenance and then pull your deficit off with carbs and then just do that for a few weeks and then start slowly adding carbs back in and work your way up to your carb tolerance and so we're just enhancing the the efficiency of utilization of energy correct coming through that's more so and then also getting your stress levels down start working on your stress management don't go crazy keep in mind you know if you if you do more in the gym, you need to eat more. If you do less, you don't need to eat less. Right? So if you're pulling back into a deficit, you probably need to do a little bit less training. And we would preferentially in that prepping to prep lease mode phase. Prioritize aerobics, not meaning that they're, that's all they're doing. Like they still training but we are doing pretty heavy on the aerobics upfront to stimulate that much faster Then the aerobics we dropped that out Now we start doing HIIT training interval training strongman stuff like that Now we start adding carbs until they not getting what we want out of it like they're moving in the wrong direction. Then we might pull the carbs out just a little bit, or we might pull fat back at that point, or we might just parlay some of the calories from those in the protein and work on thermic effect of food and satiety. So would least mode usually have a period of ketosis at the start of it? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Like I said, it's lower carb, not necessarily low carb. If I have someone who's more on the endomorphic side, then, yeah, we may give them lower. They may hit ketosis. They may not. I'm not really partial. Right, so more low carb. Just more low carb. So depending, like for me, low carb is 100, 125 grams of carbs. If I go much lower than that, I don't feel right. For Isaac, he's a prototypical ectomorph, low carb for him is like fucking 500. You know, I mean, I haven't measured him, but I'm convinced he'd probably make ketones at 500 grams of carbs. If I pull him down to 300, he starts crying, right? And, you know, he needs that. And most of those, those tall, skinny, lanky guys need the carbohydrates. So do you find that doing that period of improving that metabolic flexibility will fat loss is better thereafter, like their ability to oxidize those fatty acids? Absolutely. And as well, because we're using a multifactorial approach, people discount aerobics because of bullshit that's been perpetuated in the industry. But the fact is you recover in the aerobic pathway. So if I get someone who they're doing 24 sets and they're fucking wrecked and they need a lot of rest, if they do a couple of blocks of that Leasmo training, they're able to do a hell of a lot more work in the same amount of time. And for fat loss, we know density is king. So if I can do more work in the same amount of time or the same amount of work in less time, that's best for fat loss and improving that. Not necessarily adding volume, but adding density to your workouts. And the only way to do that is if you recover between sets really well, that you recover in that aerobic pathway, not in the sympathetic and aerobic pathways. Interesting. And would the reverse be true as well where, yeah, going super low carb for extended periods, you lose the flexibility? I mean, because that's one of the things we recall Broderick talking about, those enzymatic pathways to break down carbohydrates. You know, if you go super low carb or zero carb for an extended period, you know, your ability to break down and assimilate those carbohydrates and then use them as an energy source. And even glycogen loading, you know, it's even in those latter stages of a prep, you know, or coming into a competition or whatnot, like your ability to load carbs can be compromised because you just had no carbs for the last four months. Absolutely. You know, so the reverse is true where, like you said, you want to not no carb, but you do want to have those carbs in there for that flexibility. No, absolutely. And we look at it as being, if it's not a pathological issue like epilepsy, there's really no reason to go on a long-term ketogenic diet unless you just want the kind of lifestyle. And people make up, everything's marketing, right? So, hey, we've got this fucking keto OS. You can actually achieve ketosis while eating carbohydrates, and it's good for your brain. Yeah, fuck off. Your brain likes carbs, period. Your brain loves fucking carbs. but yeah so we won't use it for long term if I have somebody that you know they're overweight or obese and all they do is fucking watch net geo and they don't actually train and maybe they're good to get some stretching and walking yeah fuck it I'll put them on ketogenic long term because they've got plenty of stored energy on their body they're not going to store carbohydrates effectively anyways so they're going to have issues with with turning sugar into energy the heavier you get the more inflammation you have you're going to start mismanaging your glucose and you're going to start mismanaging fat. So, fuck it, if I'm going to take one or the other, I'm going to take the carbs out for a little bit of time. It tends to make them more satiated. I can take carbs out, replace that with protein, which then keeps them from wanting to binge all the time. It keeps them from being hungry. And then we can work on getting them moving, getting some weight off, get that 10, 20 kilos off, and then they're going to start managing their sugar better so we can start kicking sugar back in. Absolutely. So, I guess it comes back to what you said before we kicked this off. If you love all diets and it's, I mean, if you happen to like a keto style diet and you're more coherent and compliant with that style of diet, then go for it. For me, the low carb diet works because I tend to not binge. If I start, and I fucking love carbs just like everybody else, but if I start pumping the carbs up too much, then I'm more prone to start wanting to binge all the time. And then that doesn't work for me. So I have to pull them back out a little bit. I did a three week keto, eco keto diet once, which is a ketogenic vegan diet. And I just decided to- Out, get out, vegan. But you know, hey, if I'm a sports nutritionist and I'm writing these things for people, I've got vegan clients. I need to know what they go through. And I don't give people things I haven personally done to myself But like I got vegan clients I got a vegan staff member and it like okay Zoe and I go out for lunch and I looking at the menu like fuck I can have anything I trying to so if I don put myself through that experience I can have empathy for the client and understand that like, how fucked it is for them to actually eat out. And you know, they, that's why vegan restaurants exist, because non-vegan restaurants aren't very good with their, you know, they may have one vegan thing on the menu, and it's usually fucking disgusting. Yeah, yeah. Vegetarian, yes. Vegan, probably not. I haven't caught on to that. It was actually a really fucking easy diet. I just ate beans and coconut milk and sriracha, and that was it. Boring, but it was easy. One pot of beans, I didn't have to cook. Milk prep, simple. Yeah, beautiful. Three weeks later, I was craving meat. I was going to fucking kill a small child and devour its face, but I decided to eat meat again. And you mentioned, just jumping there, Tommy, you mentioned the ketones. Because as far as I understand, taking ketones supplement, yes, you're going to measure ketones, but it doesn't mean you're in ketosis. You're just getting ketones in the blood. Is that right with those supplements? You do actually have to put the diet behind the ketone. You can't just load carbs all day and then take the ketone supplement. It's like, well, I'm in ketosis, ketones. I'm not opposed to the exogenous ketones for specific situations. Like if somebody is doing a ketogenic diet and they want to use those to keep from getting the keto flu, cool. If you've got seizures, cool. If you're using it for some type of brain issue, like some type of neuron issue, cool. I get it. But it's the way they're marketing it saying that, oh, this will help fat loss. No, motherfucker. Like these are a byproduct of oxidizing or breaking down fats, right? If you add ketones, your body doesn't have any reason to fucking break down fat to make ketones, you dumb shit, right? so don't take them thinking that oh cool i can eat 400 grams of carbs and lose fat because i'm taking this fucking supplement and that's what really pisses me off about it but you yeah fuck people will take them and then they'll measure their fucking blood ketones and go oh look see i'm in ketosis no you dumb shit okay here's the thing i'm gonna eat 200 fucking grams of sugar and measure now i'm sitting at fucking 18 millimoles on it and i'm okay i've got diabetes yeah if i stimulated diabetes because i ate 200 grams of sugar yeah yeah good way to look at it It takes a little more to go into ketosis. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. This is what makes me so fucking angry. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you're going to put their dick in the dirt, goddammit. That's it. But certainly they have their place. You're not knocking them. It's like if you – Yeah, no. Keto flu is a real thing. But you've got to get the real stuff. And I'm by no means really hip with the education on them because I don't use them. And, you know, because you've got to look at the difference between the salts versus the esters. And I'm not the man – like there are people that know all about this. That's not my thing. And one time I did, a friend of mine gave me a tub of his ketones, and they were all ketone salts. And I didn't realize how much magnesium was bonded to some of the ketones. And so I'm taking it. And in measuring blood, I mean, BHBs, they're not going up that much. So I keep taking, taking. Oh, my God. Next thing I know, I'm in a bathroom with fucking green apple splatters and fucking assholes turned inside out. But I did lose a couple of kilos, but, you know. Magic. part of the thing that i don't understand if you don't have a pathological reason to to use them is um fuck man i can teach you how to make ketones really fast for free yeah just by kicking your training volume up and you'll cut your carbs back enough to not fuel get rid of all the liver glycogen you're pretty sweet right so eat your carbs around your training or during like before during and after training so i'll peri-workout do a lot of walking everybody's out doing their steps anyway so but go out and walk fast try to get your heart rate up to like 130 140 you don't have any problem keeping keeping the ketones high and you know it doesn't cost you anything but time which you're already spending time training anyways and now now you can make a check to luke lehman and send it to me because i just saved you saved you from buying those fucking ketones dr lehman very good it seems like the efficiency of whatever dietary path you choose is dependent on creating some sort of deficit in energy initially. What is the real benefit of that? Why is it so effective of getting the system malleable so you can start playing with it? Well, so if we look at, so we'll go back to the mitochondria, right? So we're talking about a lot of people that get on the ketogenic diets, they get them because they believe they're insulin resistant. And what we're finding, there's a lot of new research that's come out in the last few years that shows that really insulin resistance is a protective mechanism by your body. And I remember when I used to teach bioseg and we were telling people to take all these fucking herbs and shit to increase insulin sensitivity. Now I'm like, oh, fucking facepalm. Like your cell, there's a reason your cell doesn't want the sugar in the cell. And now I'm forcing it to accept the sugar. And now you're causing more metabolic disruption. So one of the big theories that I'm more apt to believe in is that, you know, there's some type of dysfunction across the electron transport chain. Your pyruvate is coming into the mitochondria. the Krebs cycle saying, yeah, I don't fucking need you right now. You get fucked and it turns it back into lactate pushes it back into the in the bloodstream which is where I use the lactate scalp to measure that And eventually if the mitochondria is dysfunctional and doesn want it how is the cell going to alleviate the issues with the mitochondria Well, let's make this cell resistant to insulin or resistant to sugar. So now you lose glucose sensitivity and insulin sensitivity. And the only way you get insensitivity back at that point is by training. So movement-based glucose transport. And now let's reduce the glucose load so now the mitochondria can catch back up. So now we limit the influx of glucose that increases or decreases oxidative stress at the mitochondria, which allows the mitochondria to get healthy again and start doing what it's supposed to, which is replicate itself and also destroy old dysfunctional mitochondria as well. And then in that time frame, the insulin sensitivity comes back so it can actually utilize the glucose. This is how, because I get questions all the time, is how does muscle nerves have all these girls eating 400 or 500 grams of carbs a day and not getting fat? Well, it's not the carbs' fault. Like, carbs don't make you fat. Your body's fucked up. And when you fix that, they can crank the carbs. So we might have them on a high-protein, moderate-fat, low-carb diet at first. But within three or four weeks, when they've really started working on the mitochondria, they've really started working on the cardiovascular respiratory system, we can start adding more carbs. adding more carbs. We've got girls, I've got girls eating 750 grams of carbs a day, and they're fucking 54 kilos in weight, and they're just shredded to the bone. I've got guys that eat 1,200 grams of carbs a day. And, you know, my thing is to get them to the point where they can eat as much carbs as possible because within reason, without creating a negative aspect of that, that way they can fuel muscle growth. That way they can fuel their brain. That way they can fuel all the processes and they're not starving themselves so that when I get a girl on stage, she's still eating close to 3,000 calories when all the other girls in the back are eating fucking rice cakes and fucking almond butter and eating 600 calories a day. It doesn't have to be that way. Fascinating. And is the deficit that Tommy suggested, is that also part of the process to improve the mitochondrial function? Does that have to occur to some degree until things are working well? Yeah, absolutely. But then you have to find out where is that deficit, right? So we can do measurements for BMR, and then we can think about, okay, what else you've got to BMR? Then you've got keeping your NEAT up, you know, keeping your thermogenesis. You've got all these things that kind of go into that. And a lot of people, they're at a point where they're eating so little that they're only fueling that BMR or a little bit less, and now they're catabolic and their body's lowering BMR by getting rid of bone and getting rid of muscle and getting rid of lean body mass. So that BMR takes a little bit of a hit. But they've got about 40% to 45% calories that they can add back in without having to worry about gaining a lot of weight because all they're going to do is stimulate thermogenesis. Their NEAT's going to go up. Thermic effective food's going to go up. And then we can choose specific macros to enhance that, like extra protein and increase thermic effective food. if i have somebody eating a moderate fat and a high high protein diet low carb well now we can start parlaying some of that fat calories into carbohydrates so lower the fat add carbs lower the fat add carbs because now we're increasing thermic effect of food by 10 to 12 percent without even changing any calories yeah so when we build the calories up one of the some of the first modifications we may make is to get somebody ready for dieting i'm going to pump up the protein a little bit to manage hunger i'm to and also to elevate thermic effect of food so i might take calories out of fat and pump up the protein and then i may take calories out of fat and pump up the carbs without ever changing the calories so we're making a hypothetical uh caloric funnel so they're not eating any less and actually now they're eating more volume because you're eating things that have lower calories and higher food mass yes right which makes them happier so then they can create that caloric funnel they can they'll start losing and then when they stop losing or they're not in the range we want them to lose every week now we pull out you know 50 grams is this, 20 grams of that or whatever, and we start trickling down so we don't have to starve them at the end. Well, there was Luke Lehman, part one of a two-part expose. We're doing the muscle nerd. There was warts and all. There was dick in the dirt and all sorts of ass talk. And there's nothing wrong with dick in the dirt. If you haven't tried it, try it. Cam loves it. shed some nice, sensible light on the ketogenic diet. And he just was starting to lead into the prepping for prep and how he gets his athletes into this beautiful state of metabolic balance to then diet them down. So that'll be coming up next interview. It was almost a bit of foreplay there. He was just getting us in the mood, then he shut it down. So I hope your listeners felt that way too. They just got a little aroused,

ready to go and say, oh, we're going to come and listen next week. Sorry. Very nice. So Luke Lemon from the Muscle Nerds, he'll be back for part two and I look forward to that really exciting stuff. And don't forget the Evil Genius seminar coming up in March. Arnold Sports Festival weekend will be the first one kicking it off on the 15th. Brods, myself and of course you and them, we're back for round two in Sydney on the 22nd I think, Tommy? 22nd, that's right. So for details, where do they go for that one? EvilGeniusWorldwide.com There are early bird tickets available For $150 Which is very very exciting What about if they want to get you? Get me TomHewitt.com.au And for yourself Rawdon Mate they can just hop on Oh mate I've got to wrap this up We're going to wrap this up mate Social media Instagram or Facebook Let's get out of here Tommy Okay Strap yourself in We'll see you next week One, two, ignition, liftoff.