Barbell Shrugged - How Often Should You Get Blood Work w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #628

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: How Often Should you get blood work done What markers are the most important What can you learn from your blood work Markers that your doctor may be missing What the standard blood panels missing and was you can do about it   Connect with our guests:   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are talking about how often you should be getting your blood work checked, what you should be checking, what you can expect from your doctor, and some of the areas that your doctor might not actually be the best person to read your blood work. I know that may ruffle a few feathers,

but we've been going through some pretty extensive testing with Dan Garner. He is going to be coming on the show very, very frequently. We're about four weeks out from launching these episodes, and we're going to be coming on the show very, very frequently. We're about four weeks out from launching these episodes and we're going to be taking the most comprehensive dive into total physiological health. I'm talking about testing and results and lab-based nutrition to likes I really believe that nobody has ever done. You may remember Dan from the episode, How to Increase Your Testosterone by 300%. We did it in last November, I believe it

was released. And you can go check that episode out. But we are going to be taking the deepest dive ever. Doug and myself, as well as about eight of our clients have been going through a protocol with Dan. And we are testing stool samples, countless amounts of blood work, hair follicle testing, toxicity levels, saliva, urinalysis, sweat analysis, getting the entire physiological health and working with Dr. Andy Galpin. So all four of us have just been hitting it hard. We've been hitting it extremely hard, building out what we believe to be the coolest, not even the coolest, the most badass program that you could possibly do to optimize your health. But more importantly, Dan's going to be on the show every single week. And we're

going to really take a deep dive into physiological health and what that actually means. And one of the most comprehensive studies that you can do is, or tests you can do, labs you can do, is get your blood work done. We're going to be bringing this into our Diesel Dad Mentorship. So it's like a full transition. We're obviously going to be doing the same nutrition, fitness, accountability, tracking sleep and all that. But our ability to add blood work into our Diesel Dad mentorship is super rad. I'm so excited about it. And we also are going to be able to push some higher level testing, depending upon where your total health is at already. So we're super excited about it. We're super excited about

having Dan on the show. And this episode was recorded while we were doing all of our testing, because we've got extensive labs from our past, but none of it has ever really been analyzed as well as comprehensively. And a number of things that my doctor has, I don't want to say lied to me about, but kind of missed in my blood work that Dan was able to uncover is kind of astounding. So before we get into the show, I want to thank our sponsors, Ageless Male Protein Friends. We are in three stores or three products on the shelves at Walmart nationwide. When I say nationwide, I mean 2,200 stores. And what is super cool about Ageless Male Protein, not only am I the spokesperson for the brand because I love them so much,

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Simply take two capsules before you go to bed and you'll be amazed by the improvements in your mood and energy levels and how much more rested you feel when you wake up. For an exclusive offer, for Barbell Shrugged listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com forward slash shrugged and use the code shrugged during checkout to save 10% and get free shipping. That's magbreakthrough.com forward slash shrugged. M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H.com forward slash shrugged and use the code shrugged during checkout to save 10% and get free shipping today. And friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about testing

because honestly, I'm going through like an insane amount of tests right now. Doug Larson and I started working with Andy Gallop and Dan Garner. You probably can go back and listen to episode something. It's called How to Increase Testosterone by 300%. It's like a two-hour long show that we ran. We talked about tons of diagnostics and how they are able to get in and read a lot of just what's going on under the hood of the car that is your body. And we are in the middle of a 13, well, 12 tests sitting in front of me right now.

And whatever, however many tests they were taking in the first time I went to the phlebotomist to get a bunch to get like nine vials of blood taken out of me. And the reason we're doing this is really about the kind of like the highest level, most comprehensive testing that you can possibly get to diagnose everything that's going on in your body, from hormones to health. But this show today, we're going to be talking about just the casual person is looking to be healthy, get an understanding of what's going on in their body. Um, and, and from just your yearly physical blood work to all the way up to this testing protocol that we're going through, that takes 30 whole days and a ton of work to get through. Um, I'm excited about this cause I'm literally in the middle of, it's like overwhelming my brain right now. How many things I didn't even know that you could possibly test for.

I know we've done these at-home tests in the past, but I think the simplest place for a lot of people to start this journey is really just your yearly physical and understanding where your blood work's at. What does that one-year checkmark actually mean? Are you guys good at getting blood worked on every year? Yeah, I am. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I don't have like a yearly routine or like a actual systematic process that I follow,

but I tend to just enjoy that type of thing. And so I do it fairly regularly. You know, all the basic stuff, just getting like blood sugar and lipids and white blood cells and whatever, which my white blood cells are always super low. We've talked to many people about that. I'm always like at like the bottom of the range. And every time I get blood work done, it seems to be, you know, I'm like in the very, very, very, very, very, very, very bottom of the range.

And so I tend to think that there's got to be some negative downside to that. But for me, everyone I talk to says, do you get sick all the time no you're fine so i'm actually really excited to be working with andy and dan because like getting you know getting blood sugar and lipids and a handful of other things and you know occasionally hormones testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin and that whole uh group of of things is great to do, but it's, in my opinion, not comprehensive enough. Like Gabrielle Line told me a couple years ago that she thinks I might have a parasite. And then I tried to see something about it

and got a referral twice and they couldn't take it. I never actually went in and got that work done. So I don't know if I, maybe I have a parasite from traveling to Africa or wherever. And it's causing problems for me, but I haven't actually got that checked. So working with Andy and Dan and getting like getting all the blood work, getting stool, saliva, urine, hair, checking for, yeah, checking for like heavy metals and parasites and allergens and like all the stuff that like a functional medicine person would want to look at. They're getting all the data points and bringing them back so they can look at the whole system and all the things that are happening all at the same time and not just grabbing a couple

of things and then leaving out the majority of the rest. And then if you do that, you really don't really know what's going on. You only have a few things in blood work, but you don't have all the other stuff. So I'm actually stoked to be working with those guys so we can actually get a comprehensive view of our entire physiology. I think a lot of people make the mistake of they enter a fitness program and all they think about is weight. And they obsess over one marker. And there's so many things now you know there's yeah like you know i know andy posted about you know some new evidence about the gut um uh was it microbiome or whatever he posted

today so there's so many markers that we need to look at you know including like mobility was one like i know with our own athletes we measure almost every single joint to number one, instead of just saying, Hey, we're going to do mobility. You know, this random thing is that we pinpoint what they need and what they don't need. And so, and we did find the good thing about when I did that is that we found some common markers. So now we do a 10 minute warmup as a team, you know, to address, you know, what I saw as patterns. And so, but yeah, But yeah, as many objective markers that you can. And it just makes working out, for the general pop people, it just makes working out more fun.

Instead of just obsessing, body weight, body weight, body weight. I mean, yeah, you definitely need that. But there's way more things to think about. Yeah, I've taken, I don't even know, call it like a handful of these at-home tests. And I feel like the problem with blood work is you go in and it, like Doug's saying, you don't really get like a comprehensive view of everything that's been going on in your life. Like if you go get blood work, you're going to get all this data, all these data points back.

And one, I don't know how much, uh, I really care about many of those data points. And the reason is just because it's like a snapshot of a single piece of what's going on in your body without like a history of the last three to six months. And that's what's super cool about getting a lot of these higher level tests and more comprehensive tests is when you get your stool sample done, you're getting a really good look at your gut bacteria and the entire microbiome in there of what's going in, what's dying at night when your body cools down, and what are you excreting the next day. You're getting a really good idea of what kind of parasites are in there or kind of anything that's going on in your

digestive tract is going to show up in those samples. Now, as a bald person, I hope all of my hair that I'm taking and sending to them comes back like applicable. I don't even know how it works. I haven't gotten that far in our testing protocol. However, um, your hair tells a very long story of what's been going on in your body and nobody, nobody at your like yearly clinical or yearly physical is going to be taking like a, a hair follicle samples and sending that stuff in. And in knowing that every time I go in for a physical, I go in with this like, oh, I have to take blood work and you're going to send me the results back. And it's just a day, a snapshot of a single day without the full story attached to it. And I end up like, not really paying attention to the

results. Like I, I look at them, I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. That was like a day, knowing that there's like months and years of data being accumulated. And then the people look at me, and they're like, Okay, well, you look healthy, your cholesterol might be a little high. And I'm like, Well, can we talk about the cholesterol? They they're like, eh, it's like not in a bad range. It's just like not where we want it to be. They never actually diagnose or they never actually like tell you what to do. It's just, here's the number. It's out of the range. We checked the box. We said, you need to get better. And you go, yeah, like, okay, well, some cholesterol is good. Like if I'm at the low end of high, what does that mean? Like, I can just give me something. They just go, no, you you're fine. You look, you look okay to go. What, why did I pay you for the blood work?

If I could have just looked in the mirror and been like, well, I can see some top abs. I should be okay. Like it's really, I find that just doing the blood work on a yearly basis is like shirts. It's the buy-in, and it's what everyone does, but you're really never getting an actual idea of what's going on inside your body and how healthy you actually are. I don't know if healthy is an objectively measurable thing. We're hoping to find out. But it's just a really challenging thing with just one data point over 365 days. And then once you actually get the results back, the doctor just looks at you and goes,

you look healthy. Oh, okay. Thanks. I'll see you in 364 more days. I appreciate your work. Why does it feel like my heart is pumping sludge through my chest? Is that okay? Right?

No, that's fine. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's just's it's thicker oil that's all yeah it feels like thicker oil um what do you in in knowing that if like if blood work is the the very minimum buy-in at your yearly physical uh what i guess numbers do you actually take seriously like the cholesterol thing to me always comes back in a relatively similar range and it's the only thing that's ever been out of whack just a little bit.

And I always just assume it's because like I have higher levels of stress. I don't sleep as much. I have like, at the time that I started seeing these things, it was in the middle of owning a gym and it was like, well, there's some things in my life. Do you know what it's like running a gym and having to be up at 4.30 in the morning every day? It's probably not the healthiest scenario in your life.

Isn't that weird? Yeah. Any of the metrics from your yearly blood work vary seriously? My cholesterol is the only thing that's ever out of whack. And it's been, like you said, it's been out of whack for a long time. It's been just like near the high side for a long time. It hasn't gone above it. But I definitely consider it and think about my choices of food.

And it's really what's got me doing cardio is that very thing. I don't know if that'll even help it but so definitely definitely has me considering yeah you know are your numbers like i don't even know what i don't have any blood work in front of me but are your numbers like way past the range or is it just like oh there's like a if there's a yellow red and green are you like yellow yeah i'm just like yellow it's like but i've been yellow for a long time i should probably address it but um especially with the amounts of stress i have here with you know this is you know i thought i had the semester under control it's worse it's way worse honestly this is like it's it's almost too much the stressful part for you is you've learned too much in the last 18 months you know and i love that part but like dang this thesis thing is like no joke like i just wish i had a normal you know this would be if i could go back in time and go ahead and do the

thesis without kids would be so much easier but it's not the case they take up time uh doug i would imagine you you have a pretty good insight into all the numbers and a yearly understanding of where you're at. Which ones do you take more serious than the others? Well, it depends what you mean by more serious. The cholesterol and whatnot is certainly important. I take it seriously,

but it's never really been a problem for me. My numbers are always on an absolute scale are low enough or high enough. I think cholesterol is kind of a funny thing. It's like total cholesterol is a combination of something that people kind of consider to be kind of bad and then something that's kind of good and something that's like a little more neutral. So it's kind of funny to think that something that's like bad, good, and neutral, if it's high, is bad. It's like, what does that mean? So it's really all about your ratios. My HDL to triglyceride ratio sometimes is like two. My HDLs might be like 80 and my

triglycerides would be like 40. That's phenomenal in many ways. I don't really worry about cholesterol too much. It hasn't really been an issue for me. You know, blood sugar is great. I mentioned why blood cells a second ago, like it's always low, but it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. I've been told my prolactin is a little bit high, and that could potentially be causing problems. But actually, again, working with Andy and Dan, I'm hoping to get more data points to see if that can be ruled out or if that, if that actually, it becomes more relevant or less relevant. Um, so I, I've, I've been concerned about, about that specifically. Um, my testosterone is, has basically always been low,

but every time I've ever checked from like the furthest back, I can remember checking as probably like 2013 or so. And it was always like in the mid 400s so not not particularly high if you if if you think total testosterone like normal range like 300 to 1300 something like that and i'm like 400 something and i'm in my 30s and i've been basically healthy and fit my entire life uh that that seems weird to me that that would be so low um but maybe i'm just maybe that's just genetically where i fall i'm just on the lower end of the range. That is surprising.

Yeah. There's going to be, there's going to be a spectrum for, for numbers like that, where there's going to be like a bell curve and most people are going to be in the middle and some people are just naturally going to be on the high side. And so we're naturally going to be on the low side.

Is that me? I don't, I don't actually know. It's always like that. And I'm always healthy. I always eat whole real foods. I always, I always work out on and on and on um so again i'm super excited to get more data points

with with andy and dan here in the very near future to see if any of that uh becomes a little bit easier to understand the best thing is having andy give you direction so it's one thing getting all the information like we all do you know in past, we've all had blood work, but obviously not as extensive as you guys are going to get. But to have direction too, like from Andy, someone that understands physiology can say, okay, this is what sucks. Let's do this to handle it. That's the big awesomeness about what you're doing. Yeah. I think kind of that next level too that I want to say, like I said earlier,

I've probably taken a handful of these like at-home testing kits and I've taken the stool sample for kind of like understanding your GI. I've taken some of the saliva ones and then you ship them off to the company and then you download the app and it tells you all your food sensitivities. And I hate to be the guy that is negative towards things like that,

but it always comes with some sort of thing in my brain of like, how did this happen? Where did this data come from? Who did these readings? Can someone tell me what happened in the background? Because I always end up getting these like average things like, well, you're kind of sensitive to gluten. You go, isn't everyone? It's like, you're kind of sensitive to corn. What does that mean? How, isn't everyone like, is everything like a sort of green light? Like that's literally what all of the at-home tests I've ever taken come back as. And I don't know if it's because my expectations are like, I want some exact meal, like a scale, one to 10. One, don't eat it.

10, eat it all day long. You're going to be super shredded and jacked. And you're going to be front squatting with Travis Mash one day if you eat all the sweet potatoes. It's always this like, kind of, sort of, these are like green. And if you're going for performance, you should have fewer of these. If you're just going for health, you should have fewer of these. If you're just going for health, you should have four of these. And you're like, I don't understand what any of this means,

but to get someone to actually read the data to you and actually explain it to you, I've never had it. They just kick you the food list and say, here's your sensitivities, and it's all like a 7 out of 10. And none of those things hit home with me where I truly trust the data that's coming back because it's always such a flexible thing. And it's, it's always so vague on what they're actually trying to, to, to tell me when I, when I download the results, it's, it, I feel like the at-home tests are, there's probably a lot of value in them i just uh i i always it always comes with like

a large dose of skepticism for for what i'm actually trying to get out of them when i take them you know they were making such a valid point like you know that we all are like most people they're in fitness at our age are all they're thinking about is like let's lose weight but if you did, if you really had the blood work done first and really started attacking, you know, a lot of these, you know, where you're weak or where things are looking not so good, inevitably you will start to live a healthier life and you will start to see your weight drop without focusing on the one thing. You know, we obsess about something. We don't do anything about it, but if you start, you know,

just like I tell my weightlifters, you know, if they, if they obsess about, I need to, you know, we obsess about something, we don't do anything about it. But if you start, you know, just like I tell my weightlifters, you know, if they obsess about, I need to, you know, like Ryan needs a total 320 to medal at the Olympics. If that's all he thinks about, he won't even make it to the Olympics. He'll like drive himself crazy. But if you just, you know, if you just focus on what you can do that day, day to day, small little process goals, then it's something that you can sustain for the rest of yourto-day, small little process goals, then it's something that you can sustain for the rest of your life. Same thing with general population.

Focus on being healthy. Focus on these markers. Focus on, you know, having, you know, getting your blood sugar right, your cholesterol right, and then, and all the, even the deeper things that Andy and his buddy can tell you. But like, you know, that's what you focus on, the process, not the end goal. What do you focus on as far as blood work with your high-level guys? Well, I mean, we haven't gotten to the point yet.

You know, there's so many other – I think that Ryan would be the first one that would be, you know, when I've tapped out on all the easier things, that's where I would go next. And I think that we're getting near that, you know, when I've tapped out on all the easier things, that's where I would go next. And I think that we're getting near that, you know, that we have done all that we can do. We're using, you know, we're using velocity. We're getting tons of data on his RSI scores. I mean, so now it might be really considered after talking to you guys

about Andy is about getting some blood work done with him just to see what, you know, when you're talking about at 1% or even smaller, really, it's less than 1% we'll, we'll divide first place from like fourth or fifth place. So now it'd be time. It'd be probably a half of a percent. You're talking about one kilo. Sometimes, you know, first through third is broken down by one kilo, you know first through third is broken down by one kilo you know so now it's time just really to consider doing these smaller things but right now most of my athletes just

I mean they just need to start sleeping or yeah they need to like it's like even though they're high level they're not doing things they need to be to be on level they just have to have high genetics they're great genetics. I think that's another piece of like the skepticism is when you get those reports so that they send you the test and it, and they, they like break even on whatever testing protocol they're, they're sending you. And then they run gigantic supplement companies and consulting companies for

your health and the background. Like there's a massive amount of funding getting sent to send the tests so that it can collect the data, send you a result, sell you the supplement, upsell you on the consulting and coaching, and then they send you, and then that's wherever your information goes after that is a relatively scary one.

But I don't ever actually feel like I get the, hey, you're only sleeping six hours a night. Maybe you should start there. You never get that. You never, ever get that. There's never a whole wellness system built into it where you go, can you send me your sleep scores from the last month? Is that possible? Can you send me a nutrition log? How many macros of, how many grams of protein have you eaten every day? How many sweet potatoes have you eaten every day? Where's the food tracking? Where's the sleep tracking? None of those at-home tests ever dig into those pieces because it's not a part of the

process. And that is what I'm so stoked about putting this program together with these guys. It's actually dealing with people that understand that it might not be the supplement. It might not be the food. You might need to go to sleep, and you might need to go walk more. You might need to get up and just get off your ass and go relieve some stress and start to focus on all of the low-hanging fruit that is kind of challenging to be a part of

because you got to get up and actually go walk. You got to actually go to bed earlier. You got to cut your phone off earlier. Like that, that part of what we're like working with these guys and putting together is really like the thing that I'm like so stoked about because I, you've, I've never gotten results back and, and taking the at-home test or taking the blood work. And the doctor looks at me and is like, so your cholesterol is a little bit high. Can you tell me how many hours of sleep you're getting? Never happens. They never, they just look at the number and check the box and it, they just, you're just like another person

that they had to see. And I always feel like that when I'm dealing with the at-home tests, like, well, here's the 17 supplements you need to take. But nobody ever asked me like, how many steps am I getting in a day? Nobody ever asked me what my training program is. Nobody ever looks at lean muscle mass and like how, how that relates to your BMI. Like nobody ever actually does this like actual comprehensive explanation or examination or testing. It's always just, here's the blood work, check the box, that person needs this supplement. You go, supplement is like the tip of the iceberg and importance. But I'm imagining that if you don't have the knowledge of health and wellness that we are lucky to be a part of and talk to the people

that we get to talk to, like it's very easy to get people to go here take this and it's going to solve the problem and i just really really struggle with people that just send the the at home test or you get the blood work and the doctor looks at you and they never ask to me what is the most important questions of how much sleep are you getting at night what are you eating what are the stress levels you're dealing with on a daily basis like are you trying to run a business or are you trying to like sit on your ass and just collect a paycheck like what are you doing all day long that's really adding to the total number of stressors that you're dealing with in your life that never comes across that's never asked it's very unprofitable to tell somebody

to go walk 12,000 steps a day it's super it like knowing that stuff it's like it it it it immediately when I get on the phone with them or when I talk to them it immediately puts this like red flag up where they just go you need this and you And you go, no, I don't. You didn't ask how much I'm sleeping. You didn't do it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And without doing that, I immediately discount almost everything you're saying from here on out. Part of that's the difference between having like a coach who's like going to be working with you ongoing on a weekly or monthly basis or whatever it is versus just seeing a doctor one time one visit you go in you say i want to get

blood work they say okay come back one more time we'll talk through it and then they just kind of release you out into the wild and you're you're on your own you know right uh like when i when we live in san diego we had we had many more options for things like this like there were there were functional medicine practitioners who they're they're kind of half doctors, half coaches. And that was readily available in San Diego. And I went to some of those people and did have like more comprehensive workups at times where if you go to a regular doctor

and you're a regular person and you want to go in there and just like get your blood drawn, talk to the doctor, tell him your problems, get your pills and then go home. Then, you know, if that's what you're looking for, then that's fine. But if you're looking for that, and then you go to a regular doctor, and they hand you like a stack of forms to fill out, like here's 50 pages of stuff to fill out, tell me your

whole history, all your nutrition, your food you know track your sleep for you know for three months or whatever it is like just on and on and on most people are gonna be like whoa dude you need to back the fuck up i'm busy yeah i have shit to do uh so really it's just so it depends on what you're looking for so those things are out there and we are we are now you know i like that stuff and it's hard to find i realize it's hard to find which is part of the reason that we're trying we're working to offer it with Andy and Dan, like something very comprehensive because it is hard to find,

but it's out there in pockets, but it needs to be much more widespread and available. Yeah. I totally agree with you. Yeah. We have our athletes, you know, they all,

well, especially the ones who are wanting to be like, you know, Olympian or Team USA, they do a questionnaire every single day of their lives. And then when they tell us like, you know, what was your body weight in the morning? You know, how many hours of sleep did you get last night? We look at number of calories they ate the day before. Then we look at total number of meals. What I also do, this one is just for Matt Wanniger. I have a question for Wayne.

How many meals have you eaten before you walk into the store? Because literally the guy would come in at 4 o'clock having not eaten. I'm like, what in the world? So, and then we look at sleep quality. And, like, either, like, with the sleep quality, if they have a whoop, then we go by those metrics. If they don't, you know, then we're, we're just best guessing it, you know, five being, you know, it's the greatest night of my life, three being normal.

And then we look at fatigue, excitement to train, muscular soreness before the session, joint pain. And then here's some cool ones you guys, you know, might want to track is we look at like stress and or anxiety outside of the weight room. So like, so then we start to think about like for these guys you're thinking about school family relationships um we look at feelings of depression and then um oh we divide the relationship from the school and job related stress and anxiety but that gives us you know so like when i see like a metric like velocity tip

down i can go to their questionnaire and i can be like oh okay and i can start and then you can even do some you know good statistics and you can draw correlations between their answers and between what's happening and when it happens so like you might notice a downtrend in a relationship for three or four days before you get this tip down in velocity and performance. So it's just a simple, cheap way to start tracking your life and to get a good idea of what you really need to work on first before spending a ton of money on stuff that you're probably not going to do anything about anyway.

Yeah, I think it's really important to have some many objective measurements, but then also some subjective measurements. Like for all the guys that are in the DieselVad mentorship, they do a lot of very basic things. They track their body weight every single day. They track their body fat percentage on at least like a biweekly basis. They track their sleep every night and their macros. Then on the more subjective side of it, like every time we meet,

which is weekly we always get a subjective rating about how they feel about their body what their general mindset is like like on a scale of one to ten like how do you feel how much energy do you have on a scale one to ten how hungry are you on average on a scale of one to ten over the last week like most of those people are trying to lose body fat and so you know getting a subjective rating of their energy and hunger i think in quantifying it is really important because if you show up on a call with with coach and they say you know how you feeling how you got how's your energy uh you hungry you go oh yeah i feel pretty good pretty good it's kind of like the like the most generic answer and you don't really know yeah week is it is it really improving or

do they feel better or worse about it? But if you have that subjective rating where you can see that it goes from six to six and a half to seven to eight, and they're feeling better and better and better about their body, and they're feeling more and more and more confident and motivated, and or when we set goals with them, every week we come back and we get a subjective rating of how much effort they put into accomplishing those goals. So if it's something very simple, like, you know, wake up and drink two glasses of water in the morning, I go, okay, well, not only are we going to ask you, did you do those things, but how much effort do you feel you put into doing those things? Are you actually trying your best?

You know, and if, and if you're not trying your best, if it's a three every week and you go, oh yeah, like I, I just, I just didn't do it, whatever. Like I probably could have done it, but I just, you know, I just didn't do it. Okay, well, that's a problem with their effort and motivation and compliance more so than a problem with the goal itself. If they're telling me tens every week and they still can't accomplish the goal, it's just the wrong goal to set in that moment. You need to make some type of tweak or alteration or whatever it is. But quantifying all these things, even if they're subjective, I think is phenomenally important for guiding a client and for looking back on their history and getting an idea of what the flow has been like for the past weeks or months. Yeah. I think also when you start to put

those graphs together or you start to put seeing where their subjective ratings are, it actually gives people a really good idea of kind of the progress and how easy it becomes. Like we see so many people when they get into the program just firehose to the face, overwhelmed by the total amount of things. They think that it's so hard and they think it's going to be like, and you just go and then yeah, it's week one. Like we're changing a lot of the habits that you currently have that have gotten you to being 40 pounds overweight. Like it,

you can't just keep going and living this easy life. We have to change this stuff. But over time, like the, the, the difficulty level, you start to see that it gets very easy for them to just have these basic things like taking a picture on Mondays. How easy is it to eat healthy? It gets a lot easier when you have to do it every single day. It's a lot easier to understand what food's going in your mouth. It's a lot easier to set goals and have weekly metrics that you want to chase. I think the cool part is after we start to get these basic things down, you start to see people wanting to take on more and more healthy habits. That's where the thing starts to really kick off. It's like now we've got this basic thing down where we're sleeping well,

we're eating well, we're training well. That's just the norm now. Now you start to get into like, well, maybe I could tweak just where I eat lunch. So I'm getting outside more. Maybe I can tweak my morning routine so that I can get up and walk a little bit more. There's a lot of like additional benefits as you just get the baseline down and then you start to add really healthy habits onto it. So it's like, you can see the scores of these subject subjective ratings for, for the baseline, just because that's the way you live your life. It just becomes so easy. And then you start looking to make things harder in your life. It's like a radical transformation of just the way that you view your own life. Like you're, you're trying to make it harder by adding more healthy habits

instead of looking for the easy route or like not searching for some simple solution. I think that those are, like when you get five, six, eight weeks into the program and you start seeing people like trying to add harder, more challenging things to their life, that's really where like the big mindset transformation comes in. Totally.

As you were saying that, I'm thinking that we could potentially add something to the program about quantifying the amount of time you spend outside. I've never actually asked somebody to quantify the amount of time they spend outside, but I feel like that could be one more kind of downstream thing thing to measure i don't think it's the first thing you need to measure but if you're trying to like form healthy habits i feel like just being outside in general especially in the daytime especially getting you know some some sunlight on some

portion of your body for at least you know 30 minutes or an hour a day uh is really important so but i've never actually asked our clients to quantify that. I feel like that could be something to play with in the future. Or even like quantify how much time you spend on the cell phone would probably be even better because now they've got these diagnoses for that. Now you've got the social media anxiety. It's like a real thing. And then they've got people where it's like a fear of missing out is a diagnosis.

Um, it's talking, which is not as bad as it sounds like social media is talking. I just read this huge study last night till 3am, but like, um, they just, yeah,

it was talking about, you're like all your athletes sitting up at college, wondering what the person sitting right next to him is up to. I know seriously. And so the social, the social media stalking is actually what that is is a person who just goes on there and trolls through social media and uses it as a like um like a relief and so it's not as bad as like well for people who are like um have comparison yeah social media comparison if i go in there and compare myself to somebody now there's depression there's social media depression so like look at how much time and it's all here's the kicker it's all directly correlated to how much time one spends on their

cell phone so you know by simply looking at how long and trying to like diminish that a little bit you'll get more healthy because you'll get healthier because more time is definitely less healthy. Yeah. We're, we're filming this two days or recording this two days after Facebook and Instagram went down and how rad would it have been had Sunday night? We had like a, a, a countrywide mandate that everybody had to go get blood worked on Sunday night and they wake up Facebook and Instagram are gone and no one can do anything on social media for a whole day. And then Monday night, you got to go get blood work done again with the stress level of gone way higher or way lower due to your

inability to get online and post about your life. I've been so great just to see like one day, like what is the, what's the study about heart attacks? The day that we lose an hour, heart attacks have like some ridiculous, ridiculously higher rate of happening that day because as a globe, we lose an hour of sleep. And then the day that we gain an hour, now I'm going to have to go back and find this. I'm going to put this in the show notes for sure uh there was a sleep expert on rogan that was taught

spent a bunch of time talking about this they did a study it's like uh on it was on rogan it's got to be real right um they're probably nine joints deep on hour four he's's like, check this out. I'm going to lie to everybody. Listen to this sleep study. But the day that we lose an hour, heart attacks have like a massive rise. And the day that we gain an hour, heart attacks have a massive decrease because everybody just gets an extra hour of sleep. It's like the weirdest, weirdest thing.

One day. It would have been so rad to find out what everyone's blood work looks like and just overall cortisol levels in their body with either,

with one day without social media. It would have been fantastic. I'd have put a lot of credit into that. if there's been any studies relating blood work to phone use

where they like take a group and they do their blood work and then they don't let them use their phones at all for a month and then they take more blood work and i don't know if there's any actual changes in blood work uh if you did something like that but i feel like somebody's got to be thinking about actual research to see how your physiology and or of course like all the psychological or mental health things you can measure there as well, which are probably even more relevant. But yeah, I'm curious about blood work in relation to phone and social media.

I will definitely look into that for you because that's right up the alley of what I'm studying right now. So yeah. Yeah, Mash, in all that research, how deep do they go? Because I feel like we're what? We're like 20 years into the internet. I think I was, yeah, it's like my senior year of high school is when I got my first email account. So we're what we're like 20 years into the internet i think i was yeah it's like my senior year of high school is when i got my first email account so over 20 years and then that is

like my senior year of college so we're 15 years 17 years into facebook yeah i wonder i really would love to know. That was one of the interesting things that came out when that lady, they were talking about Facebook just as a company. Imagine how many sleepless nights you would have if you grew a $1 trillion company in 17 years. $1 trillion in 17 years that is i'd like to find out when you i'd like to give that a shot i don't know if i want to know i don't know like think about i'd be lying if i said i didn't want to know it would be cool but man how would you actually have a friend

how would you how would you have time to train? What would you do? You couldn't front squat for 17 years at the speed that that company is growing. Like once you get to that level, you just hire the best brains in the world and you don't have to like work. And you got to trust those brains. That's the hard part. Oh yeah. They have access to everything in the world. I was like, why they said – that's so stupid talking about Facebook. Yeah, those people have all of the information. That's so stressful. You know more than the government knows.

You have way more information. I couldn't handle that. I couldn't handle the stress. A trillion? Come on. I have to tell you guys this story of the last time uh i went and actually not the last time the last time in san diego that i went and got blood work done and it was like it was probably the moment where i just look i i if there was a day in which i was going to go i'm just not going

to doctors anymore like i I know I have too many smart friends to need your regular dude off the street doctor. I came in and I got my blood work done and I walked in and I was trying to be fun guy. And I'm like sitting down for my blood work consultation. And the guy tells me that I have like moderately high cholesterol. And I'm like, cool. Can you like explain what needs to be done? He's like,

eh, it's just nothing to worry about. Blah, blah, He's like, yeah. He said something along the lines of like, well,

you look like you're in good shape. So there's nothing to really like be over concerned about. He's like, and then he said something about like, he asked about my parents and how long my my parents and how long my grandparents had like lived i go well i don't have to worry about them because i'm funny guy and i like to make jokes i go i'm gonna live till i'm like 150 years old anyways i'm gonna be a super freak i've got i've got all the fitness

i've got all the things going for me and he he looks at me goes yeah there's probably just a pretty good chance you're gonna die when your grandparents do because you can't outrun your genetics. And I was like, please tell me you do not tell your patients this. Like people that actually care. Please don't say that. Like you're just confined to this body you were stuck in. There's no way to make it better. There's no way to make it worse. You're just confined to this body you were stuck in. There's no way to make it better. There's no way to make it worse. You're just going to die when your grandparents do. And I was like so irritated that the – I'm just going to call him out of shape. I don't need to get into all the details.

You know what it looks like. Had like the legit professional opinion of like you're just going to die whenever. There's nothing you can do about it. I'm looking at your blood work right now and literally don't even worry about it because you're screwed you're you're only going to be able to live to this thing and it was like I couldn't believe like one I thought that I would at least get enough respect that the guy would be like yeah like there's a chance you could like have a very long healthy healthy life. Not at all. Just came back with like the hammer of don't worry about anything.

You're just going to die when it's time. And it was like, man, I am never going back to you ever again. Like imagine if there was like a real problem and he just looked at you. Well, this is just what you got. You should never – don't worry about it. This your time yeah i disagree with him completely i just there's way too much data to say he's wrong you know like i mean i can look at my own family and see that every last one of my my grandparents uh have been outlived by their kids you know so like you know if that train continues it should be awesome you know or and that train continues, it should be awesome, you know, or, and you look at, like, my grandparents on my dad's side, he lived to be 95, and, you know, some of his kids lived to be

old, some, you know, my dad didn't make it past 63, you know, so it's like, it's like, there's just, there's too much data out there to say that, you know, you have to consider the way someone lives. Now, if you have certain genetic predispositions, you know, certainly like there's certain cancers, there's, you know, they're pretty, they're hereditary for sure. But like, other than that, like the, you know, the way you live your life is definitely comes into play. You can just look at it, but look at people who, you know, that, you know, that live to be 80 and there's going to be certain characteristics in their lifestyle on par, you know? Yeah. It's a, in my opinion, it's a, it's a genetic range. We'll call it. Right. Take, take, take one of your lifters. Like if you have a, if you have a lifter who

he comes in and the very first time he ever tries to squat, he squats 400 pounds. He weighs one, he weighs one 85 and he squats 400 pounds and he just he's never lifted weights before he just was very far down the spectrum of genetic potential that person if he maximizes his genetic potential could go from the 90th percentile or whatever to the 99.99 and actually you know push the world championships or whatever he's trying to get to but if you if you walk in you're 185 pounds and you've never lifted weights before and you you try and squat, and you can't even squat your own body weight, well, you're genetically starting much lower. You could train your entire life and never get anywhere near the other guy. That guy could train his whole life and squat 500 pounds,

and that'd be really, really good, really good. But then there's a lot of people out there that squat twice that much. He's just starting in the 20th percentile as opposed to the 90th percentile and he can push it to the 75th percentile but he's never going to push it to the 99.9th percentile and i feel like that's kind of how it is for uh there we go this conversation about about when you're going to die like you know barring a normal life like you're the median for you might be like 80 years old but if you live a really a really healthy life maybe you can push it to 90 95 100 and if you live a really unhealthy life you know maybe you die 55 whatever it is like so your genetics put you somewhere but then there's a range above

and below depending on lifestyle factors and other things that may or may not be in our control now i think yeah i think that's's a really important piece of it. The doctor that you choose should understand your life as well. That's why we were so stoked to go hang out with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon when we were up in New York. She gets it. She totally understands the life that we're living, the choices we make, the fact that we're not starting at zero trying to get to just healthy. We're not trying to get off the couch and get moving and lose 50 pounds. That's a different starting point. Going to get what felt like three gallons of blood drawn out of our body that day,

it was like an hour of blood draws. Like it likely isn't totally necessary for someone that's trying to just get to basic levels of health, like get to a decent body fat percentage, to get to a decent weight, to get to a decent level of fitness, to start building muscle mass. Like if that's where you're at, you probably aren't overwhelmingly interested in, in taking some, like many, many blood vials to find out how to optimize every aspect of your health. Like there's some basic things. And that's what frustrates me with the, like we were talking about with the at-home test. It's like, people want to know where their testosterone levels are. People want to know what their GI looks like. People want to know what you can test for at your house and then you get the supplement packets like well why didn't

any changes happen it's like because you didn't have a coach talking to you about how to get actually healthy you you just took this test and it spit you back a day of results like i think that's that's really like finding a doctor that understands where your starting point is and has been down that road before. It's not like they can't, everyone can't read the books, but when you go to Galpin, you go to Garner, when you go to Gabrielle Lyon, when you start to go to these people, they already know what the last 25 years of your life have looked like, chasing nutrition, chasing barbells, chasing fitness, chasing all of these like basic components to becoming a very healthy person. And then their job is to take you to the next level. Their,

their job is to get in and look at micronutrients and look at your GI and look at gut bacteria, look at your digestion, look at hair follicles to find out what's been going on in your life for the last three, four or five months. Like those, you've got to find the right person that's going to get you there. And then there's an efficiency time piece to it of, well, no matter where you're at, you don't want the slowest route possible. You want it to be the person that can look at you and go, okay, here we're pinpointing these three things that we need to start with today. Most likely it's sleep, it's nutrition, and it's training.

Once we get that done, what's the next three things that we need to work on? Then we can start to build into the supplementation side once we have seven to nine hours of sleep. Once we have a decent training program that progresses you, you're actually building muscle mass and optimizing metabolic function, blah, blah, blah. Once you have those pieces in place, then you can kind of upgrade your life to the super, super cool testing and really put like basically like the afterburners on to optimize everything that's going on. When I talk to the guy that just tells me I'm confined to dying at whatever my grandparents did, you just go, wait a second. Isn't there like a better conversation? And I think that people like have to find a doctor, one that they, I don't want to say respect, but respect or like value the opinion because they've been down the road with you.

Like they don't have to know exactly where you're at today and everything, but they have a really good idea of what the last 25 years of your life looked like because you've looked a certain way. You have a certain level of health built in as your starting point for having a real conversation. This is, you know, I totally agree. I do wish that this is where medicine would get to is that, you know, it wasn't just like, you know, you keep testing until someone is super sick. It'd be really cool if they did, you know, get on the same page as like, you know, people like us who are trying to help people get healthy ahead of time. So if we were all on the same page, I wonder what it would do

to the population and like in the life expectancy, you know, there's a lot of really smart people out there that say that, you know, that 120 years old is not unrealistic even in our lifetime. And so I feel like if simple things like this, if we all got on the same page, you know, we can help push that number along. And like, obviously the older I get, the more I'm hoping for that to happen. But, you know, but then again,

I don't want to live to be 120 and decrepit. You've got to have your brain, right? Right, right, totally. You don't want to be 120 with no brain. No, that's okay. I would lose anything but that. I want my wits. If I can't walk, that's one thing,

but at least if I can communicate with my children, that's what I want. I don't want to be like where I can't, you know, who are you? And it's rock, you know, that would be upset. Yeah. Imagine like having kids and then like knowing them when they're like 95, like you can imagine rock as a 95 year old and like, you still have a relationship with them. Like that'd be so sick. I'd be so old though. 140. so sick i'd be wild so old though 140 i'd be like i remember when i was your age and life is so much better you can set the world record for sure the only human in the history of the world to ever

squat a thousand pounds and live to 140 um yeah like you know i'm not even... Greatest of all time. Greatest life of all time. I remember... I remember 110 years ago squatting 1,000 pounds. Holy shit. My spine can too. Guess why it kills me right now. No kidding, boys. I've had 73 knee surgeries. A couple of things. Before we go, I'd like to mention, you know,

if there's athletes out there or even like CrossFitters, like there are some pretty cool things that I would recommend you guys measure. But like, you know, with getting a velocity profile would be one of them knowing what end of the spectrum rat, as far as like, are you, you know, super strong and slow, or are you slow and weak or in the middle, which perfect you know so i would recommend that and here's the coolest thing of late that i've um i started doing the rsi score you know this semester as part of my thesis and which is the reactive strength index all that is you do a depth jump which we've chose chosen 45 centimeters to

compare all of our athletes against and And what we found is this. This is really cool, is that here's a few things that you can get from one simple test. Now, of course, you have to have a jump mat, but they're not very expensive. They're really not. So what you're looking at, you're looking at ground contact time and then the height of the jump. And what that tells you is elasticity or really is deeper. It's the neuromuscular system. It's looking at the, you know, because when you, when you land and react and jump, that's,

that's an involuntary contraction. That's the muscle spindles. That's the gold detenor organ. That's the, the, what is it? The Titan. That's the protein filament that's deep in there. That's more responsible for elasticity than, you know, maybe people once thought. But, like, it gives you this.

Not only does it give you who's probably going to be your best weightlifter, which is, you know, Ryan, it's also going to tell you who's at risk of injury and what kind of injury. Here's what I mean. And I'm going to – this data will be published by next – hopefully by next semester unless it gets rejected. But if it gets rejected, that means they're going to be rejecting Andy Galpin. And I weighed my counsel. It's Andy and it's Brian Mann. So if I get through them and it gets rejected, I'm going to be like, you're, but, but like, it's going to tell you too, is if you got a slow ground contact time,

but a very high jump, then all you, you know, your main focus should be elasticity. And that means you're at risk of a tendon injury, which is, that's real bad. Now, on the other hand, if you've got a mass, if you've got a very low ground contact time, but not a very high jump, that means your, you know, your muscles are weak and that puts you at risk of a muscular, muscular tear. So it gives you exactly where to focus on to prevent injuries and where, you know, obviously performance. If you're a weightlifter, you know, there's a lot of weightlifters who have very low ground contact times that aren't very strong. That means I need to focus on strength. On the other hand, if they have a low ground contact time, then I'm in high wind, meaning slow then i'm

going to focus on plyometric movements which we are we've added a lot of because of the rsi score a lot of the warm-ups we do every single day is geared towards improving certain flaws that i've noticed that are like i said earlier that are becoming trends and it's improved already in one week already things have improved including uh joint soreness at the knees especially. There's your tip for the day. There you go. Coach Travis Mash, where can the people find you? Mashlead.com.

Hopefully this thesis won't kill me, and I'm going to start writing a lot of articles about the things I'm finding. It's just really cool, this study I'm doing. If today's show is any indicator of your life, you're only a third of the way there. So I'm excited to see what this next 80 years looks like for you. I know, man. Yeah, it'd be cool.

I'll come up with something really cool for the world of strength and conditioning. You got time. Yeah. Just keep going. You've got a lot of years to figure it out. Doug Larson. On Instagram, Doug C. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. going you got a lot of years to figure it out on instagram douglas larson i'm andrews varner at andrews varner we are barbell shrugged barbell underscore shrug make sure you get over to diesel

dad mentorship where all dads are losing 20 to 40 pounds by supporting natural testosterone production without drugs doctors destructive diets and for all of you i'm showing travis mass for the first time doug's already seen it. Look at this. See that? Wait till we turn the box. That's Anders Varner's face on a box in 2200 Walmarts. So if you're at a Walmart right now and you go into the performance nutrition section and you do not see my mug on a box, you're in the whack Walmart. You're in the one that doesn't count.

You're in the Walmart that's not producing enough revenue to stay in business. That's probably not true. But go to the cooler Walmart because if you go to the cooler Walmart and you go find my face on the box, you can download the 21-Day Challenge, the Pro-T Challenge, and that's exciting stuff. So Walmart, Diesel Dad Mentorship. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.