Barbell Shrugged - How to Build Size, Strength, and Muscle w/ Dr. Ben House, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #504

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

Dr. House has a Ph.D. in Nutrition from the University of Texas at Austin, which is one of the top ranked public universities in the United States. Dr. House is also a Nutritionist (CN), Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist (FDN), and Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (CFMP).   As a strength coach, House has worked at both the high school and collegiate levels, including time under Coach Wright at the University of Texas Basketball. Besides practicing Functional Med, coaching, and writing articles for Functional Medicine Costa Rica, House has numerous publications in peer-reviewed, high-impact scientific journals. House blends his knowledge of research and Functional Medicine with years of experience working directly with a variety of different clients.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   The mechanisms of building muscle. Hot to find the right exercise and why some movements may not be the best for you What is the best way to squat for maximum quad hypertrophy. The case for isolation and using machines for muscle Why CrossFit athletes need more hypertrophy training for performance   Dr. Ben House on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram ————————————————   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   Legion Athletics Whey Protein, Creatine, and Pre-Workout - Save 20% using code “SHRUGGED”   Fittogether - Fitness ONLY Social Media App   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

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This week on Barbell Strug, we have Dr. Ben House. We're talking hypertrophy. We spent a ton of time talking about squats, the best type of squats, how to get your quad super jacked. Before we get into the show too deep, I want to talk about my friends over at Organifi. Three years running. My number one source for all the greens the reds the golds all of the micronutrients that go into

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forward slash shrug save 20 friends let's get into the show and talk about some hypertrophy welcome to barbell shrugged i'm anders varner doug larson coach travis mass and dr ben house if you have never heard of dr ben house, you need to go back to episode 343, which we talked about maximizing testosterone without steroids. We hung out with you in Minnesota at points or treats, which we were all supposed to be at again this year. But this COVID thing showed up. Dude, you're no longer in Costa Rica at Flow. You're back in the States.

How is life going? How's training? Because today we're talking about how we maximize hypertrophy and how the price of getting shredded. But dude, how's your training going? How's the life back in the United States now? Yeah, I'm in North Carolina. When I started, I was 22. My wife let me have a squat rack. And I'm 34 for context. So that's 12 years ago, my life let me put a squat rack in the living room. And it's it's nice to be in the basement again with my baby. I don't like press down here. I mean, I'm really thankful to even have a barbell. Yeah. When I got back to the States, I had a hidden barbell up in northern Wisconsin.

So I drove 23 hours in 36 hours to go get a barbell. And I'm glad I did. That was four months ago. And there's still no fucking barbells. There's no barbells in this world. No barbells. It no barbells in this world no barbells it's worth more than worth more than gold dude someone in my gym came up to me was like hey do you know where i can find a women's barbell and i have one in my garage and i wanted to be like

like all the immediate thoughts were well for two grand you can have one i can't do it it would hurt my soul too much to sell sell anyone the barbell for that much um dude we're uh as far as building muscle i want to talk about getting jacked first because in order for us to talk about getting shredded we have to talk about hypertrophy and building muscle um and we have a ton of people that are in the CrossFit space. And what we've noticed over the last couple of years, I think just as CrossFit has like plateaued a little bit is the whole world is kind of coming back to this, like the bodybuilding thing. It's like very sexy now to be back in the bodybuilding space. As a trend, do you think that, you know, kind of getting away from the CrossFit thing, is that just your general thoughts on, like, how that CrossFit movement played out

and why people are getting back to just trying to get their pump on and more of a bodybuilding-focused training program? Yeah, if we're talking about winning all the hypertrophies, I think that in terms of CrossFit, you can get some solid development depending on your anthropometrics. You can have some massive delts. You're probably not going to get really good pec development unless you hopefully add some's some things that CrossFit may have been lacking. And there also are some genetic anomalies in CrossFit and I'm not a natty witch hunter, but there are some people that just get absolutely jacked, just thunder jacked. And they might not even be the best CrossFitters. Some of them are fairly terrible CrossFitters. They're just jacked.

Um, and it might be that those people, like one thing that we've seen when you look at them, they tend to, tend to occlude a lot. So they lock up blood flow, and they turn everything into blood flow restriction training. And so they kind of get massive because they're probably doing CrossFit. But when they're doing CrossFit, they're actually taking a lot more sets to failure. And so they're probably maybe not as good at the sport of crossfit but they're they're getting big because they are driving a ton of metabolic stress and i think that why we saw this pendulum shift for some people away from crossfit to more

bodybuilding training is that they fell in love with the process and i think what we what we saw is like crossfit they maybe got tired of crossfit because And I think what we saw is like CrossFit, they maybe got tired of CrossFit because CrossFit is hard. It happens, yeah. Like it's hard. And you see them kind of jump back into CrossFit because it was their first love and they want to go back into it and then they'll try it again.

Like that's me in a nutshell. Like I did like – One day a week. Isabel, the other day, I made it to seven. It was great. Seven in a row. Put it down. That's enough for today.

I do it one day a week. I have to. You got to go play the game. It's drugs. It's by far the most addicting drug I've ever encountered in my life. I love it. Someone will just start CrossFit and they'll be like, hey, man're they're super new I'm like let's do Diane I'll just immediately like because I could I could probably do Diane and drop him a hat and we'll just I'll I'll go sub three and they'll be they'll

be like they've got they got a year under their belt and they're like they're like five minutes in and I'm like so yeah it's not really fair I mean I could get dusted by a lot of people but CrossFit is really really fun they gamified fitness more than anything else uh but I think it does have a shelf life and so you see people uh gravitating towards ole towards power lifting and and towards more of these physique sports and the as terms of like how jack people can get, um, I think there's also a ceiling for how jack you can get with a barbell and a dumbbell. To be honest, I think that you can probably get pretty jacked, but as far as like leg development, if you don't have the, if you didn't get really, really jacked quads doing

CrossFit, I don't think that you're going to get them. By doing more barbell exercises, I think you might have to do leg extensions and some single leg work. God forbid. If people are really wanting to jump into the – I see people kind of dancing around it. If you're going to do a physique or a bodybuilding split or something like that, just do it. Just go do it for six months and then come back. And you might notice that if you put on more mass, your squat might even change a little bit.

It might give your joints a break. So I don't think there's a reason to be wishy-washy or feel guilty about it. Just get jacked and have fun. Yeah. Do you guys also suspect that 10 years ago it was realistic that you would go to regionals if you were a pretty good athlete, maybe you go to the games. Like it wasn't quite as competitive as it is now, like not even close to,

not even close to as competitive. And so there's so many people now who, who five or 10 years ago might have been trying to still compete, but now they look at the, at the, at the freaks on, on, you know, at the games or at regionals and they go, oh, I don't stand a chance against those guys. I'm just going to lift weights to look good. I'm out. I like CrossFit.

I like doing it, but I don't need to be competitive at it because I'm never going to be competitive at it. So they just like to lift weights, and they transfer over to functional bodybuilding. I think the stupidest thing HQ ever did was get rid of regionals. I think they should have expanded. I think they should have had neighborhoods think they should have had like neighborhoods. Like everybody's a pro dude.

Yeah. I totally agree. The dumbest thing, dumbest thing they ever did. Because I remember, I remember watching the, I was at the CrossFit games in 2000, like 2013.

I was there. And I remember, cause I was like super good at deadlifts and double unders. And I was like, it didn't matter that these dudes did like three days of workouts before what mattered is that i could potentially beat them in that one workout and i think that was the drug right there and then once they took that away once i think once it got too elite once it became like the nba or whatever it is you just had a lot of people who threw in the towel.

And I think that, I know for me, that was one of the big reasons is there was some hope that I could, you know, make it on a team, even though I was the fifth best guy in my gym. I think most sports like kill it because they have that middle area, like, you know, football, basketball, baseball, you always have, I want to make a, get a division one scholarship or even the minor leagues, you know, a million people that will tell you I was a semi-pro football player or I played in the minors and there was something they could shoot for until they realized that's it. I'm not that 1%, but like, yeah, you're right.

CrossFit, all they have is that one percent you know you got i guess youth you know they can uh you know i know a lot of youth come to me as soon as they turn 18 because they know it's a wrap for quite a while before they're going to be able to compete against the big dogs they need that middle spot so yeah i agree with totally that they need to bring the you know reasons back if they want to save the sport i I think. When you think about, you mentioned earlier about going to failure, and obviously that's something that shows up in CrossFit all the time. But when you think about just overall where the research is at in building muscle, should people be going to failure?

And I know that also kind of gets into understanding training age and what actually is failure and having the ability to like really push yourself to the max. But is, is training to failure in, in your, you know, even if you're doing your bodybuilding or, you know, going for hypertrophy and your CrossFit, whatever, whatever sport it is, however you're lifting weights, but should people be pushing themselves to failure on a daily basis?

I think you have to know where failure is. That's, that's, lifting weights, but should people be pushing themselves to failure on a daily basis? I think you have to know where failure is. That's, that's, I think the most critical component. If you've been a coach and you've trained people, we've all had that client who stops, you know, 17 reps from failure. And they're, they're like, they're like, no way I can do one more. You know, in the back of your head, like their velocity, their squatting and their losses at 0.5 meters per second. You're like, dude, you can keep going for at least half an hour here. And so that, that I think is, is really important is knowing where failure is. So you kind of, you know, you know that where that line is and then you can choose to go there or not. The, the risk reward ratio there is probably for your compound barbell lifts.

Back squatting, you can make the argument. So this is completely nuanced. And we've had this discussion probably too many times, is if you go to failure on that first set, do you completely blitz your ability to pick up reps on those subsequent sets? And that's, I think, the potential downside of going to failure on that first set, especially on those big boy exercises, is like you go from maybe you do a 10 RM. And so you hit a legit 10 RM. And then you maybe rest three to four minutes. How many reps are you like your leg, your legs might be so smoked, you get like six reps on the next set,

or and that's all very individual. But I think that's where the risk is potentially there and that your ability to really pick up volume throughout the entire session might be diminished now could because you might go if you want four sets across you might go nine nine nine eight and that that would give you potentially more effective reps uh and so that's now do i think that you could just go to a leg extension or how, what's the best way to strategize for quad volume? Um, I don't know. Do you need to train to failure to get jacked? No.

Uh, do you know, do you probably have to know where failure is and, and be able to put a ton of effort into training? Yes. Um, so I, I think that the risk of going to failure all the time especially on those compound lifts that you know have some fatigue there's there's definitely some some learned components and they are a little bit more complex then I think that your your risk might be a little bit high and train to failure all the time that said if you're taking a crossfitter and moving them to more of a bodybuilding type program you better put some failure in there because otherwise it's going to be too

easy. Isn't there a lot of research that says like, you know, going to failure too often, obviously going to failure, I think it's probably one of the number one mechanisms for hypertrophy, but there's a lot of research out there that says it targets a lot of type one fibers. And so like, you know, Stone, I'm pretty sure Stone et al, 2018, he did some pretty good research saying that targeting volume for hypertrophy,

it targets more of the type two fibers versus like going hypertrophy a lot targets type one fibers. What are your thoughts there? Yeah, like muscle type specific hypertrophy right um if you're trying to get as jacked as possible i think you just want to pick it up uh however you can uh now if you are trying to be an athlete like a powerlifter weightlifter football player yeah probably don't want to go there um I think that you, the big thing is you're going to get

that the, you're going to get some diminishment in athletic ability by getting jacked. And I think a lot of people don't really appreciate that. And that's where you look like if you get into the vertical jump versus squatting, the research isn't good, but I think there's probably a threshold there. like once you get to you know once you become a double body weight squatter or somewhere around there there's got to be some law of depreciating returns where you're no longer going to get any better uh and so if we're thinking about sport the weight room really the weight room isn't the game and so that if someone is a someone is a different kind of athlete it's a great point there i'm gonna go with that velocity drop off paper and that if you look at they trained with

a 40 velocity drop off which isn't actually that bad that bad of a drop off um versus a 20 so the 20 drop off like they're not taking many sets to failure at all like hardly any and they got they got more they got more power adaptations but they did not get as much hypertrophy and so that's why i think that you have to decide like what type of block is it maybe or what type of what type of client that's good 40 so 40 was like um was like where they got the most hypertrophic gains they got more so that's that's the other big the big point with that is like you could you could do more sets stop early and do more sets but now you're getting into the practicality of it like if i'm saying if i'm taking every if you're if you're doing your 10 rm for four reps or five reps that's that's just and I do 10 sets of that. That's just a lot of time. Um, and so for

me as a dad, I'm doing like, it's all about efficiency for me. I'm doing, I'm doing sets of 12 to 15, not because I think that there's anything special about 12 to 15. It's just, I don't have to warm up. Yeah. You got to get to, you got to get to 30 somehow. I'm just like, I can go do a, like, it's not that I love the leg press. It's like, if I squat, I have so much like mental baggage with that. Like I want to get up to the weights that I could do before, but like pressure, I just put all the weights that I have at the gym, put it, put it on the leg press and do it as many reps as I can for three sets. Um, and so there's, and I'm out in 15 minutes versus if I got a squat, I'm in there for 45 minutes.

And if I got a bad squat day, then I'm, you know, then I'm talking to the baby about my squats. We know about that. Travis is teaching his five-year-old right now how to be super jack. So we brought his, he has his barbell on vacation. We have a five-year-old who got mad. I forgot it. So I had to get his grandparents to bring his barbell to the beach. I five-year-old who got mad i forgot it so i had to get his

grandparents to bring his barbell to the beach i'm like he's an animal um dude i love that you brought up being a dad because uh i'm two years into this dog and mash both have whole stable of children me just having one i feel like i'm really just doing nothing. I'd say you're being wise, but go ahead. But how much of your training, I mean, is that like a real thing that you think about? Like how do you condense all of the goals that you have into like a 20, 30-minute window of getting it in while you've got nap time? Yeah, I think that's a huge demographic is how,

like now you're talking nap time. Yeah. I think that's a huge demographic is how, like now you're talking about optimal versus possible. And, and like, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to superset, maybe I'm even going to move, I'm going to move to full body. I'm going to use, I'm going to use those lifts where I can get in and out without a lot of time warming up. Um, and that's, that's just where my head's at and you can get, I mean, you can get pretty big with, that's the other thing is if you look at like how much volume it takes for people to grow, yeah, you might get more results for more volume, but the volume threshold is pretty low, like 10 to 12 sets per week.

So if I can make sure that I hit that in timeframes where I'm able to get enough done and put in some work, that's where I'm at. I'm actually really interested in how you structure that if there is like a structure to it. What I'm finding for myself is that I spend a lot more time, you know, it's like a hinge, a squat, and I pull. There's very little pressing going on. Just if I'm going to get three days, just getting the most bang for your buck. Are you still doing or trying to get in like full body days or is, or do you kind of break the week into different, different body part splits? I'll do a lot of auto regulation stuff.

Like I'll have, I'll have, I got six workouts that, I mean, I can flip it around. And then, so that's how I'm kind of doing it. So I'll have, I'll have six full body workouts or I'll have four full body workouts. And then if I can only get through half of it, I do the next half the next day. Um, and so that's, that's kind of how I'll use that auto regulatory bit. And I think that you could, the most compressed you could get in would be some type of full-body alternating split. That's, I think, because you could – if you only got a barbell,

you could squat, wait three minutes, do a press or a pull, and kind of chunk it like that where you're really getting six minutes rest, maybe even four to six minutes rest between your sets on your squats. Is that ideal? Are you going to have some type – now are you – the argument against that is now you're pushing central fatigue from a hypertrophy standpoint because you really have to peripheral fatigue. So you're trying to stay away from that central fatigue component.

So when you do tri-sets, when you do super sets, when you do those things, you might drive, you might, the closer it gets to CrossFit, the less it's probably like bodybuilding. Um, and so I think that's where, but if we're just talking about exercise selection and hypertrophy, I mean, I'm not even going to deadlift those people. I know that's like, that's's crazy but like deadlift has no no real eccentric component for especially if someone's coming from crossfit um and so like what am i am i getting like lengthened hamstring work there i'd probably move more to a higher rep rdl that's where the bands come in that's what i've been i've been living on banded deadlifts because it gets it gets that eccentric portion and the deadlifts.

I can't stop. It's like a mandatory part of my week now, just that and then lunges, which I get like a ton of eccentric on the walking piece for walking lunges. But I've also gotten into just due to the full body kind of strength piece like sandbags and the odd objects because like the barbell is almost too good of a tool. So you're able to get a lot more with 100 pound, 150 pound sandbag. I think another thing that people don't know is like you can maintain your strength with like two sets a week, like just do two singles. And you can that's like you might might not get stronger but you can maintain your strength just like his strength is task and rep range specific

so if you just go there i'm not saying you're saying you're gonna get make gains but you may be able to hold on to it a little bit more that's exactly what i do like when i'm in when i'm at the beach and i'm like i'm trying to be the dad that's not going to be like look i know you're going to beach but i'm going to work out i don't want to be that guy anymore. I do exactly that. At least there's a number I go to the gym and I hit, and then I do what work I can, and then I'm out. And I know no matter what, I'm good.

Like I didn't get weaker. And so that's exactly what I've been doing for a long time, if I have down weeks or two. So really. Do you work with a lot of – go ahead. Sorry, Ben. I was going to say, do you work with a lot of, go ahead. Sorry, Ben. I was gonna say,

do you work with a lot of, uh, like people with kids now? And we've all kind of like, I feel like all of our audiences, at least with us, it's like they found us and then they all had their kids and we all had our kids and now everyone's a little bit older.

I mean, we just literally launched a product called EMOM aesthetics, which is a hypertrophy bodybuilding focused 20 to 30 minute imam training workout and and it's like it crushes for parents it's underserved demographic get in get out and they don't have to look at these influencers that have 90 minute full body five day a week programs. And it's like, who, who can do that? He's got time for that shit. Yeah. Do you work with a lot of them?

Like dads? I think one of my biggest laments is, is that like, now that I, there's no way to explain having a kid to like, if you don't have a kid, like you just don't get it. You're like, yeah. Like, why would you watch Netflix at 9 PM, bro? Just go to bed. And you're like, I'm like, now you watch netflix at 9 p.m bro just go to bed you're like i'm like now i get it like 9 p.m netflix is the only damn time i got i'm so much more i'm so much more empathetic to that to that client now um so i feel like i can

i i think i could i could kind of maybe i – no, I didn't even understand their life one bit. And now that I have a child and we're in quarantine and things like that, I really do. I'm so much more empathetic to that individual, and I'm not seeking optimum. I'm not seeking this, like, pipe dream of, like, what, you know, this dude who's 7% body fat on the gram. Like, I don't care about that, dude. I care about what you can do. That's what I want to talk about, is kind of that seven percent dude i dude i just created the my superhero character called the diesel dad i just straight up own it because

sometimes my house right over there since we're all in quarantine if you look back there on the other side of the computer that's where they built in the suburbs a one mile long track around my neighborhood it's exactly one mile from that stop sign back to that stop sign. And the whole neighborhood goes around it. And your boy will be in here getting to work. And the whole neighborhood knows who the most jacked dude in town is. Well, just in my neighborhood. They better recognize.

They better know. And that's why we deadlift in here. And we set the gym up so they can see it. And it's the most meathead thing I can possibly do because I got diapers to change on the inside. I get to come out here and I get to be a savage. But on the inside, your boy's got diapers to change. You're cleaning your poop is what you're doing. Yeah, that's what I'm doing on the inside.

So I got a superhero character called the Diesel Dad. Just so everybody in the neighborhood goes, oh, that the gym yeah that's right and i go in that door over there and dude's cleaning poop what do you do uh but we'll get back to uh the instagram influencer dude like where did it like the the downfalls i i feel like one of the how first off you personally how long did it take for you to kind of like overcome the used to be you to this new, condensed, optimal, like what do I have to do to kind of like still get all the pieces of my training and nutrition in without kind of like living up to this standard that you set pre pre-baby yeah the kind of that extreme reach barrier where you're like dude i if i can't train six hours you know six days a week i might as well just not train i think a lot of people set themselves up for that for me personally it's been having a routine has been really really important so i like I, like I personally, I just have, I have the baby for like two hours, uh, when, when she wakes up and then I know after, after that two hours, I'm,

I'm, I'm, you know, I'm using some type of, I'll use like from a behavioral psychology standpoint, I'm trying to set up as many checkpoints as I can so that I want, I want there to just be as, as big of a dopamine trail to that gym as possible. So I'm setting up, like I'm using, like I'll use pre-workout. I don't care what it is. Like I'll, I'll use something rewarding at the end of it. Um, and so that's what I just have that routine and I'll train. I, that's why I use like an auto regulatory approach because I'll train every day, like just because it, it fits into my day and I'm lucky enough like now every day's the same like why do I need a seven-day split I'm just gonna I'm just gonna run it on repeat uh because that's how life is and and so that's what's been really effective

for me is just having having that routine and then just having a lot of like my life is we think about rodents and they're like ingested behavior is like super ingrained in their day i mean we're pretty much the same as humans now like you go to the fridge you get the thing and then you do the next thing um so that's i just try to account for that um and when i'm working with with other clients i really just talk through their day and a lot of people set up these when they're trying to figure out like how they're going to train. They have a way. It's way too hard. It's way too hard. I'm like, dude, you're telling me you're going to drive 35 minutes to the gym for the rest of your life. No, no. So just

make it easy. Make it easy. Make it satisfying. I posted a question actually about how long it takes people to train and they all write back 60 minutes. Like they think they're in the gym for an hour and you go, well, hold on a second. What about the time it takes for you to leave your current brain space, do everything you need to do to get back to being who you were before you thought about leaving for the gym. And it's about two and a half hours. If you include the commute, the training, the talking, the showering, the driving again, like it's a two and a half hour long process, which is completely not sustainable. And, you know, when you mentioned earlier kind of the 7% body fat guy on Instagram, like those people still drive that message and it's really unsustainable and i i kind of wonder like you know in in your goals and the goals of clients like how do you even start to broach the

the the subject of like that's not a reality if you understood what that person does to peak four times a year for that photo shoot or three times a year for the photo shoot and that's where all their pictures are coming from like Like, it's got worse than that, man. They even like, those people even think they have to live there now. It's like, cause now you got stories. And so like, they can't ever be not lean. And you got an entire population that is,

I mean, just jacked and probably just all their accesses are cooked. And they're just, but there might be something. So that's where you get into the price of being lean right yeah um muscle you're you're probably and what i this is kind of my if we're being honest and i feel like we're like 45 minutes in here i can be a little bit honest uh you got you i think you got a lot of people that got jacked way back in the day uh and doing doing maybe some some stuff that they shouldn't have been doing or maybe not that i have any any qualms against people doing things they shouldn't have been doing but they got jacked i don't i don't care i'm very i'm a very amoral person like you want to do what

you want to do go ahead do it uh that's that's your life but they got jacked right and now they're probably 10 pounds under their most jackness and they're lean as shit and they're not getting any more jacked and they're just living lean and then they're preaching like we're just gonna look at all you gotta do to look like me is throw some maces around i'm like dude you didn't get that big throwing maces around you got that big doing leg extensions and maybe putting some trend in your body but that's but but and i understand that there are those individuals that those genetic few who can maintain seven percent body fat and and i've i've had them as clients man i'm like holy shit you are fucking anomaly and i hate you yeah and like

like i get under eight and i'm waking up three times a night and dude like i'm grumpy as shit like yeah and my wife wants to kill me and so like what is what is that price i know that price i've been there i'm much happier i'm a much nicer human being at 11 to 12 body fat not that percentages are that accurate anyways but and everybody's different in where they store fat as well uh so working with hundreds of people i'm like i store fat on my life i don't know why i got that's a good place like polyquin tried to tell us why but he's wrong shit and like you can't clamp your thyroid and like tell me that doesn't work that way so but we we figured out through science that it's probably

mostly genetics there's not really much we can do about it uh and so i got an ultrasound device so and i've been tracking this stuff on myself for a while and in order for me to get my legs lean oh my god i would have to be i would have to be 165 pounds and that's for if you don't know me that's like 30 pounds that's i'm not very big so that's like 30 pounds less than i am more moving and you're already lean i can look at you and see you're already lean no yeah i mean you ultrasound me i've been i'm i went to ut and i had the ability to be you know poked and prodded so i've been dexed i've been mri'd i've been everything i've been body comp to the nines uh and so i have

a pretty good idea of where i am and and i like the ultrasound if you're if you're a gym owner and you ever get to see people again i think it's a a very – for subcutaneous fat, it's a very usable tool. You can't really screw it up. Now, for muscle cross-sectional area, quite difficult. But sub-Q fat, it's actually – I think it's a little bit better than calipers. And so you can track that stuff if you want. You can also see the price of getting super shredded. So I've had female clients, and they have this idea of where they want to be, right? And you could be very careful with this.

But some females, they just don't have the body type to be that other person. And so, like, you stick an ultrasound on their external oblique. I'm like, look, you lose all the fat on your body. You got 10 millimeters of fat right here. You got 10 millimeters of fat right here. You got 15 millimeters of fat. That's what that, that's, that's what that looks like. Not a lot of fat. So you want this crazy ass V shape, not going to happen. It's not your body. Unless, unless you, unless you shave off some, some external oblique and some muscle, it's not, it's not in the cards. Um, and so, but be very careful with how you, how you talk

about that. But I think a lot of people have, because of Instagram, because of this highlight real world, they have crazy ass expectations of themselves that are number one, probably not possible, but they could be. And That's the other thing is that we get into the genetic potential of how much muscle can you put on? Um, that's where fat free mass index can be pretty hot, pretty, pretty amazing. And if you look at the fat free mass index for females, it's, it's, it's really demoralizing for, for me because they, they, there's females, which is crazy in like lacrosse and some hockey and some of the, where those, where they don't have to maintain some semblance of leanness where they,

if you funnel enough females into the college setting, there's females who are bigger than me who have FMI, which is I think is really, really cool. They have FMI as a 27 and that's the factory mass index. It's how much muscle you have for your frame. And I have a factory mass index about 25. Like Arnold was about 28, 29. You're talking about Kai green. is how much muscle you have for your frame. And I have a factory mass index of about 25. Like Arnold was about 28, 29.

You're talking about Kai Green, 39. So like Kai Green's my height, 290 pounds. How is that calculated? FFMI is based on your, it's based on, you have to have body comp data. So if you're doing body comp data with calipers, you're probably going to get a falsely elevated FFMI because calipers just underestimate. And so you can just Google fat-free mass index.

Meno also has a pretty good genetic potential calculator, which is good, which is free. And that one is, so it's this idea that you can put on five pounds of lean muscle for every pound of bone. So one of the cool things like i'll walk around like if i'm at a grocery store and i see somebody with cankles i'm like damn you could get big yeah you could get so big bro they've been carrying that weight around man that could get huge best way to get calves just get real big bro yeah um and so that that's i think maybe that'll work for me because i've never had big calves. All right. I'm going to get up to 400.

You need a bulking cycle right now. My calves are so small. I'd have to weigh 600. Wow. Any more bones? Yeah. Can I ask you a series of questions? There's obviously mechanisms that help to get

for hypertrophy, but I'm just curious, going through it, give me a 30-second answer, like intensity. Where do you need to be when it comes to the load to actually get the most out of hypertrophy? 30 RM to 5 RMm like and if you're if you're willing that's like so hypertrophy is is so it pisses people off because it's the most forgiving of all the variables yeah uh and because it's not really a variable that you're chasing you're chasing an adaptation whereas the strength you're chasing this number that on the bar whereas hypertrophy is number one it's really hard to measure, especially when you get up like in almost impossible. I would make the argument. Once

you get closer to these higher levels of fat free mass index, there's so much noise day to day. And over the, like we're talking cell swelling, all that stuff. It's just a really hard variable to measure. So intensity, if you, if you train hard, the problem with going to 30 RM is you just ran an 800 meter sprint, try to do that on repeat. Not going to work very well. So like if you got time, you can do a lot of five RMs, but some people don't have that time. So you settle into this eight to 15 range just out of practice, just out of practicality. What about frequency? All right. So research says two times is better than one time. Research might say three times per week is better than two times. I would make the argument based on mechanistic data that

as often as you can recover. And so there you're going to have interest. So I think of it as a hammer. So I think of it as like, I'm just trying to pound this nail in. And so I'm trying to pound most, I'm trying to get muscle protein synthesis. I'm trying to live in that animalism as much as possible. Now, I think that you can probably train every 48 hours. We did it. We did a pretty cool study where we took one of the problems with the research on this is the people, even the trained subjects, they're not very trained right it's like dude that's a trained subject they are their one rep max bench is 165 like let's just be like i'm not trying to train i'm not trying to be a dick but you're not trying um at all yeah and so we had we took we took some we took some legit bros we're talking like 10 rep max bench at body weight,

which is way higher trained than you would see in a normal population. And what we did was we had them train. They did two sets to a nine RPE, so one away from failure. And they did it on repeat. It was terrible. It was a gauntlet. It was four days in a row, 90 minutes of training, full body, two sets, everything. Um, and what we found was on the squat and the bench, uh, people, if you were really, really trained, you didn't ever hit your first day numbers again,

but on all that cable work, like on all the accessory work, everybody just got better every day. They just got better. And so in my, in my head, I'm like, all right, if you've never done this stuff, you probably don't have the neurological ability to even go close enough to really fatigue yourself. So that's where, that's where like the big thing for me is like, all right, we can't be changing exercises all the time. And we can't, we, the other thing we can't, and that's, that's one of the things that I see a lot of like trained people do is they change exercise all the time because they're addicted to winning so they'll just change exercises and all of a sudden oh i'm getting better because yeah because

you're you're not actually getting results you're just getting better at that exercise you're adapting to that one thing yeah and so that's where i think we really that's where covid was kind of cool if you want to get big you probably got to be a little robotic yeah and you got to get you got to do the same shit over and over and you got to get big, you probably got to be a little robotic. Yeah. And you got to get, you got to do the same shit over and over and you got to get better and better at it. And when you stop getting better at it, you change a few variables. You don't overhaul the whole process. I would say of all the different, you know, variables, I think frequency needs more studies done than any, anything else. I think that's the one lacking, you know, aspect because like we all know anyone who's ever been in strength sports, for example, like the more frequency you're going to get

stronger, therefore, you know, over time, you've had to have hypertrophy, but there's just not enough research. And like you said, the ones who are doing it are these untrained 165 pound benching people. So what about rest periods? Again, I think it comes down to repeatability. Like, it's, yeah, can you do a 15 rep max squat and then rest 30 seconds and do it again? You're going to go from 15 to 3. So, to me, it's all about quality of training. And you want, one of my tenets is, like, if you're after hypertrophy, you don't want the limber to be central.

You want the limber to be peripheral. You want it to be muscular in nature, like your ability to buffer stuff your ability yeah and so that's where from a from a rest period standpoint i'm i'm in the practical range uh if you look at the research yeah maybe four minutes is better than two but do i think that you need to be extra sloppy and go four minutes rest on your bicep curls no i agree with you i think there's a lot of there's pretty good research out there that says twos you know two to three or three or anywhere between two and four is fine anything below that might be you know they used to say back in the day that like uh you know they would encourage 30 to 60 seconds because they thought

the hormonal gains you know those acute hormonal gains. But now we know that that's, that's poop. That doesn't help. Yeah. You're chasing, chasing the variable. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I fought for that too. What about eccentrics? Eccentric only, you know, concentrics versus eccentrics versus concentrics versus isometric. Anything there? Uh, that, so that you could, you could make the argument that this is, this is a very, this is a tangent, but if you look at cyclists, those motherfuckers have some big ass quads and they have, they have, this is one of my favorite arguments, huge giant, you look at like velodrome cyclists, you're like, dude, where did you pick those things up? And I'm like, wow, you have no eccentric component to your training. All concentric. All concentric.

So I do think that the eccentric component is important. Now, can you get results without it? I think so. Now, could you get results without the concentric, without the shortening phase? That I don't know. Like eccentric overloads also because people can – you can lower more weight than you can concentrically press. But that just

practically is really hard like what are you gonna have like wait like when you have weight drop-offs like how do yeah so me personally I mean I'm in the boat of if we're this also gets into like time under tension that doesn't look like it's very practical like to to mess with, like just, just for, if you're thinking about hypertrophy, like, yeah, if you're not, if you're thinking about strength, you want to, you might want, you might want to do some ISOs. You might want to do some, you know, triphasics type stuff like Caldeets. But if you're thinking about just strictly hypertrophy, you probably want what's ever natural. So the two to two to three second

eccentric, and then boom, go up as fast as you can and one of the things on the gym aware that i found really really helpful is i think if you put more effort into those beginning reps of the set like people lollygag if you put them on a leg press they'll lollygag on those first three reps and those first five reps maybe the first 10 reps but if i have them fucking pushing on those first reps they'll get like five more at the end and so so that's where I think having like the carnival ride where they just see the velocity, that's the biggest thing that I've seen. That's my next question. Hold on.

You're suggesting there that because those initial reps are faster, that's less time under tension, and so they can do more reps at the end because there's less fatigue? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I think it's just effort. I think it's like they're focused. The psychological aspect of seeing velocity just does shit to people. Like they just try harder. I'm, if I'm, if I'm spotting somebody and that's the research on spotting too, like if you spot somebody on the bench,

they get more reps. It's just like, it's, I think they're paying attention. Well, yeah. Someone spotted me too. I don't feel like I might get killed, you know, there's, and I'm going to go all out. Whereas I'm going to, you know, like I'm definitely going to go a rep or two more. Someone's behind me on bench, you know, and if there's no one back there, I'm probably going to quit a rep or two early because I don't want to get my head chopped off. You know, there's that. All right. So this brings me to my final question. And this is the one that means the most to me is like speed of contraction.

And you kind of answered it, but so like, does this, does the velocity have anything to do with the hyperdivine? So Beardsley would say that because of acting in myosin cross-purgatory I love Beardsley by the way you know but go ahead so like I hope you're not going to kill him but no no no like I like you too so so this is where we get into the argument about effective reps like and then knuckles knuckles like they had at it they had at it uh and I think that the effective reps schematic is is really good for people to think about now do i think it works exactly how how it plays out no i

don't think like we get we can count effective reps in that manner but like you could make the argument there that lifting weights slowly so naturally getting to a point where that myosin and x and cross bridging like they can't break apart so that contraction speed is slower that's what i'm looking for right and that all like if we compare not many people like a front squat if i look at a velocity drop off on a front squat i'm one of the only people i know that can hit a point like a legit sub 0.2 meters per second on the front squat. Not many people can hold it. Right. And cause that's fucking slow. Like that's like, dude, I'm watching you lift this and it's not moving. Uh, versus everybody on the leg press,

everybody can go sub 0.1. Um, and like, and so that's where I think that the exercise we've, we've really gotten away from machine-based training, but I think that it lends itself because of the amount of constraints and the amount of stability. I think that you can drive those slower contraction speeds. Now, on the flip side of that, they've found that you can get hypertrophy with not even training a failure with 50% of your 1RM with a squat. So that's because you're probably getting all, if we think about max muscle recruitment and getting those high-threshold units,

you're probably getting those right away on a squat where you might not be getting them on like isolation work movements. So that effective rep type terminology may have more, may hold more water, um, on isolation work than it does on your compound lifts. This is definitely one of the things I plan on looking into is I I'm working towards a PhD is, is the speed. There's one study out there. It's Shepstone et al., 2005. It would say that the faster velocities have been shown to produce more hypertrophy. However, they cannot prove why. And then there's a few hypotheses that were formed.

They may be because it was faster that they weren't exhausted, and so therefore they could do more hypertrophy but you know they don't know and then there's some that says um oh some that said you know the z-line streaming so you know like like that uh it created more um you know of the my with the the myosin the the power strokes it created more they were able to get more of the actin and so like um but i don't know they're also we get into like different types of hypertrophy right so now you're getting into like myofibrillary versus like activating satellite cells and i think there's that's the other thing

like mechanistically you might need like that metabolic stress component yeah it might not hold that much water but trained like you may need some of that stuff and that's where we always talk about limiters uh and i would counter that there's got to be some kind of threshold because jump training doesn't lead to shit i'm with you i know yeah yeah sprinting like you look at the research on sprinting like everybody's like that's the reverse causality to the nines like okay yeah i understand that there's some jamaican dudes who are real big and sprinters but that they're probably just real big like i remember i'm from texas like i remember like they had a freshman running back who was 210 and he's 10 body fat and he never lifted weights i'm like those people exist you know

uh and so and so i think like a lot of people if you look at the control research, sprinting doesn't impact hypertrophy. At all. It doesn't at all. That's the research that we have. Granted, it's not good. And so same thing with jump training. I don't know anything. I have no counter. So I'm not trying to set you up here. I'm just like, that's interesting. I just think there's a threshold. So, and I don't know what in...

I agree with you. Help me out. So that might be 50% on the barbell squat. And I think then it becomes – then I'm all with you. I think you could probably get the same amount of hypertrophy from those velocity drop-offs, like living at that 20% velocity drop-off. Right. Really high-quality sets if you're willing to do 10 of them.

But then I think it just becomes practicality. Sweet. That's awesome. I love Jim Miller, by the way. I feel like we shouldn't really expect sprinting would cause a lot of hypertrophy. If we look at the three core tenets of hypertrophy with muscular tension, metabolic stress, and muscular damage,

sprinting doesn't really check any of those boxes. There's obviously some muscular tension because you're doing work, but fast contractile speeds don't tend to produce high tension compared to lower contractile speeds or even isometrics um you're not sprinting if you're if you're competing in the 100 meter you're not really building up a lot of metabolic stress in a you know a 10 to 15 second sprint depending on how good you are um and and if you're trying to train for speed then you're not doing hundreds back to back to back to back to back while fatigued because there's no point to there's

no point to even three or four minutes at least rest yeah yeah you're probably not usually running hundreds you're running you're running shorter distances and working on your starts and everything else because sprinting is so elastic that's the other thing that like you're not you're maybe not even using that much muscles. You're just bouncing around on connective tissue. If you look at how many calories you burn running 10 minutes, you burn the same amount of calories running a seven-minute run. Bottles people's minds.

You just got better. You're not using more muscles. You just got better at bouncing around. I wonder, like, you know – I mentioned – Oh, I'm oh I'm sorry oh sorry I mentioned those three quartets a second ago we haven't really talked about soreness specifically like what what is what is the value of soreness regarding hypertrophy and then we talked about training frequency earlier how does training frequency and soreness play together and we the

crazy thing is like if you've if you've been tracking the instagram world's like we don't even really know we're not even sure how DOMS happens. Like it might be all neural now. So that's kind of one of these things that completely threw us for a loop. But, like, oh, it's muscle damage. But it doesn't track directly with that, so it might be. But how I think about soreness is I'm trying to manage expectations. So I'll always use the Outback Steakhouse analogy.

So if I go to Outback Steakhouse and I'm, you know, I'm jonesing for a sirloin or a ribeye and I sit down and this nice waitress in a mask comes up to me and she's like, hey, what do you want to eat? She comes up and she's like, what do you want to eat? And I'm like, hey, I want a ribeye. Put two pats of butter on there. A baked potato, also two pats of butter. And then I'll have a regular Coke.

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Friends, back to the show. I'm going to be pissed, right? Bitter. I hope so. Angry. Angry. I'm going to be trouble. That's what I see in the evidence-based nerd shoot with hypertrophy

because they know, like, all right, I don't need to put a bunch of muscle damage on people. I don't really need you to be on the floor. But then everything ends up being vanilla, and they don't manage the expectation for the clients. What do clients want? They want to feel acid. They want to feel a temperature rise. They want to get their ass kicked a little bit. And so that's where I think they want, like clients, I don't want them to be sore. Like I don't care if you're sore or not. In fact, as you get more trained, you don't get sore. It's something that it's not something you're chasing anymore. But how many clients come up to you like, oh my God, I'm so sore in my hamstrings because they, they associate that with a great workout. Um, so in the beginning, if I'm trying to hook, line and sinker somebody to training, I'm going to get them sore. Uh, and I'm not, maybe not like, all right, rabbit hole type situation, but I want them to be sore. I want them to feel stuff. Um, now as we transition, hopefully I can get you addicted to the process and you no

longer are chasing those types of variables that I don't, we don't care about. Um, but that said, as someone who fell in love with the barbell when I was 13, I still enjoy a good set of 21s on curls. Yeah. Who doesn't? Come on. Good mornings. I just do the good mornings because MASH tells me to,

and the next day my hamstrings are alive. Bro, don't think that while I'm at the beach, I'm not pumping out some 21s. It's funny you say that. I'm 47. I was still trying to get a pump on before I go to the beach. Oh, boy. The other thing, too, is I think soreness allows, like,

say somebody's never, like, really used their lats before. Like, they've been doing pull-ups all rhomboids and upper back and rear delts. If I can get them to, like, get more lats and I can change that and they're actually sore in their lats that to me isn't that's a good indication like all right we're actually finding this musculature uh and we're working it and so that that that could be really really really good like medial delts kind of hard to train a lot of people like just train their traps um and they're just shrugging like they're not actually training a medial though i actually wonder sometimes uh

i've done roughly at least a million lunges in my life i've done a thousand good mornings or you know rdls but there's some things that no matter how many i do of them my body's not adapting to walking lunges with a barbell on my back it's been 24 24 years. It's never, I've given up. I'm going to be sore as hell the next day. And I'm going to know that it just, it's just coming. Like it's going to take me 48 hours to just get through this and sitting down from squatty potty height to regular toilet. It's going to be tough. Like it's just, I don't think that your body.

Your back pockets, dude. Just sitting on the ground is a struggle. I don't think that your body... Your back pockets, dude. Just sitting on the ground is a struggle. I don't think that your body, to some specific exercises, it really ever fully adapts to it. I can also sit on a cable machine for 30 straight minutes and my back is not going to be so lit up the next day that I can't raise my arm. But sitting down after lunges and good mornings is going to be pretty beat up. That's where you get into the Israel argument of systemic stress for hypertrophy.

And now I would make the argument if we're keeping our tenets to peripheral fatigue, do I want the limiter to be your axial skeletons of middle lady to take load? Probably not. axial skeletons of italy to take load probably not uh and so that that's where i get into those high super high systemic fatigue exercises maybe i'm not maybe i'm going to program them maybe i'm not i mean i don't have any sacred cows um and i think that there's definitely um there's a good argument for making training hard so that when you go back to other stuff it's easier uh and that's why that's how why i will potentially use metabolic stress blocks is because it's that psychological component it's just fucking oh i never heard about yeah it's

awesome you like you like you do a little bit of crossfit you go four weeks of metabolic stress to kind of you use less weights you drive a lot of central fatigue and then you come back to a regular bodybuilding circuit you're like dude I can get done with this in 40 minutes this is the easiest thing I've ever done but at the end of a bodybuilding block you're like ah you're just laboring through it so you kind of you really diminish their RPE a lot. Do you know if there's any research on like we mentioned RDLs a second ago maximum muscle tension on RDLs is one that muscles also maximally lengthened so the bottom of the movement your hamstrings are max length and and the

movement's the hardest down there because you're you're the most bent over at the very top it's much easier than at the very bottom of course like dumbbell pec flies would be similar right like movements like that where maximum muscle length is also the point of the movement where there's maximum muscle tension seem to make me much more sore than movements that are the opposite. You talk about training medial delts, like doing like lateral raises. The hardest part of the movement is where the muscle is maximally contracted and it's very hard to make your medial delts super, super, super sore like you

can on RDLs with your hamstrings. Yeah, that's where we get into like resistance curve, strength curve. I think that we do see some regional. The other thing is like how are we looking at hypertrophy? We talked about measurement errors. Like where are you getting that hamstring hypertrophy? I'll make the argument that a hamstring curl is going to – if someone's never done a hamstring curl, I can make their, you know, I can make their legs, I can make their legs hang a lot. If I can get a lot of hamstring hypertrophy

if they've never done a hamstring curl, because they probably never changed. They never really trained that part of their hamstring. Um, whereas they've been, they've been training the length in proximal position the whole time. Um, and they haven't been doing a lot of, of knee flexion. And so, and, and so that's where i'm at is i probably if i'm thinking about hypertrophy i want to train each muscle in the lengthened and the shortened position and i know the length of position is probably going to have more of a cost um and so but coach k coach cassam is he's he's from N1. They do a lot of – so one of the big – quads.

So train the quads in the length position. You're talking about the bottom of the squat versus quads. Because nobody in – if you only have access to a barbell, you're never training the quads in the short position ever. And you can make the argument that you can't even train your rec fem in a squat because it's, it's got, it's a biarticular muscle. It's, it's just, it's, it's an isometric almost the whole time. Right. And so that's where I think the tool for the job for hypertrophy, you need, you almost need more tools. You need a leg extension in that case. I think, I think a lot of people would get really, really jacked just adding leg extensions and

hamstring curls. I think their, their, their legs would get really, really jacked just adding leg extensions and hamstring curls. I think their legs would get significantly more jacked, and they'd be able to take a ton of leg volume because they're taking away that axial skeleton load. I never thought of it like that, but that's a great idea because, yeah, you're not targeting the rectus femoris at all from a squat. So you need to do some leg extensions. It's so funny, you know, how things have been flow in this industry where they're like,

oh, leg extensions are going to kill you. You're going to hurt your knees. And now we're back to, no, we're not. It's like, come on. I've seen a lot of progression. Some people might not really understand what the heck you just said with the rectus femoris being isometric the whole time and therefore not being able to be hypertrophied like you to give like the the very brief anatomy lesson here the

your rectus femoris is the only of the four quad muscles that crosses both the knee and the hip and so as you're extending your knee when you're squatting that muscle should be shortening but you're extending your hip at the same time so that that muscle is lengthening at the hip. And so it's kind of staying in this single length throughout the entire movement. It's not actually, actually actively shortening and lengthening. It's just staying isometric all the time. Right.

And why you're probably not training your hamstrings in the squat, which people don't like to hear. You're not, you're just not, you know, unfortunately it's so, you know, but the thing about squatting ever.

Never. It doesn't happen. Never. But the thing is with the biaxial muscle is that it does cross the knee a little bit more. So it is more of a knee extender than it is a hip flexor. But there's that too. So some leg extensions are going to really get it. That's what I'm saying. And you, if you,

the other thing is, the crazy thing about the rec fem is, if, like for me, now we're in anecdotal land and I have, I have like, I have pretty big legs.

I got some pretty Saquon Barkley legs. Like, as, as, as a, as a, like chubby ass middle schooler

who pulled his shorts over his thighs. Now now now i'm pretty i'm pretty uh pretty proud of my quads and so like one of the one of the things like if you lean back on a leg extension machine you can even get more of that rec fam and i didn't have like that top like the top little pop i didn't have any of that until i just did that little like i probably never trained that ever in my life um and so that's where I think from a hypertrophy standpoint, there's so much we aren't measuring. Like if I could, if I could MRI, I think that if I could MRI your whole leg, I think that we would, it's a good idea to not put all your eggs in one basket.

I think you want to distribute your eggs so that, cause you could get bigger in different sections of that muscle than if you changed up your exercises. I am about to leg stand some weight when I go to the gym. So one thing I wanted to ask though, is I've seen, especially since quarantine kicked in, you see this,

this hack squat, foam roller, a lot more sissy squats. Is that, are you able to get in there and hit a better range of motion by getting your heels super elevated or keeping that kind of like the foam roller hack squat moving? Man, we've gotten into like two to three hour discussions about the squat as a good quad hypertrophy exercise.

And the research on this is bad. I feel like my whole world just blew up. No more squatting. No, I think the squat is an amazing exercise for glute hypertrophy and quad hypertrophy until it's not. I think that it's really, I think it's a really, really good exercise until you've gotten so strong that those aren't the limiters anymore. And that's where I think like moving towards,

I don't think they're doing shit with a foam roll and a kettlebell. Like I don't think that's working, but if you think about a hack squat, not only do you get to push vertically but you get to push backwards yeah that's a big that's a big big deal um in terms of in terms of actually using your quads so if you're trying to train your quads like so if we think about a squat what is the squat really good for you're training the quads in a lengthened position like so i'm if i know that i'm probably not going to bounce out of the bottom i'm going to take the ego hit and i'm going to move slowly through that range of motion. I'm going to try to, if I'm thinking about it from a quad perspective, now power lifting, weight on the bar, not what we're talking about here.

I'm going to drive my knees as far forward as I can over my toes because I want a maximum amount of knee extension. Yeah. And knee flexion too. So I want to get the most range of motion through that knee joint. Now, are your knees going to blow up no we've actually found that people feel kind of better when they do these lower weight squats with full range of motion um and so the research wouldn't support me though that's where i'm but again if you look at the pictures of these people in heel lifts versus non-heel lifts i'm like that's the exact same squat they didn't change

anything like so no wonder they're not getting but we might be talking about like from a biomechanics standpoint these are probably small changes now that said if your quads are not big and you've been squatting for 10 years you might want to try something else because you might not have the anthropometrics to get there this is great i think i think every power lifter would 100 agree with you because i think most people who have gone to where I've gone to where you're the tip top of that, you know as good and well

it's not your legs, it's not your glutes, it's going to be your back eventually. It's going to be what can you support. I'm pretty sure I could squat 1,500 pounds and just my back wouldn't support it. It would always be like what can I not get tipped forward with?

This is, this is a great, great, uh, podcast. I'm pumped. I joined. Thank you.

And I'm glad I had a little liquor too, but as you learn, lose that curve for the spine, you're fucked. Like you're not, you're not lifting shit. And so like, that's,

that's where i think people get in trouble is like me personally i've had a lot of sacred cows and i've had to ditch them over my over my whole career because i'm like that's a great exercise i love that you love to squat but at a certain point if your goal is to if your goal really becomes hypertrophy you're probably gonna have to leave that behind and for particular you may not have to get i'm not saying you can't be strong you can't power lift but if you look at the if you look at the systemic fatigue from that like think about all all of that all of that like mental stuff like oh my god i have way less weight on the bar how much time it takes like i can just put you on a

hack squat you have none of that, and you just mash. Yeah. Good choice of words, by the way. Yeah, literally. So, what are your thoughts about, like, pre-exhaustion? You know how back in the day, and still they do it, you know, they'll do their... My buddy who was a great shave met, you guys have met Chris.

He was a good power strut, by the way. I mean, a good bodybuilder. He would do, like, like you know four sets of you know 12 reps on leg extensions and leg curls before he would squat I mean is there any point to that here's my thing with that

who does that is really strong people because you don't want to put 800 pounds on your back anymore so if I can get that, if I can get that down, now you can make the art. Like now if your squat is 300 max rep, max weight is like 300 or 400 pounds. Maybe you don't have to do that. Maybe that's a bad, maybe that's a bad idea. But if we're talking about longevity of a training career,

like that just takes a toll on you at a certain point. And I think that's why we see people using those pre-exhaust strategies because they become so strong that they're a danger to themselves. Ronnie Coleman, he should have done more pre-exhaustion, right? Yeah. And if you think about the post-exhaust, I would be more apt to do post-exhaust because I think that – and this is honestly like if we get on the stupid nuance arguments

that people have in this field, this is actually a pretty big argument. And so I'm in the camp of post-exhaust in that, but that's only because I'm probably not that strong. Like I don't have to put 800 pounds on my back, unfortunately. And so then I think, because if you look at total volume lifted, I don't think you're getting anywhere near what you would need for your squat to be adapt, to make you adapt. That would be my own. That would be my only thing with that now, because those people are already big. So they're probably just maintain, they're trying to maintain their bigness and not put 800 pounds on the back. Got it. That makes total sense. And I'm 100% for that because they feel good. And I want to at that point you've got you've

you've won so many hyper trophies that you've you've earned that right so yeah did we fully dig into the price of getting lean we kind of mentioned that at the beginning we have really we need to dive into that you kind of mentioned a few things earlier about the Instagram life and being lean all the time but what are your thoughts on just trying to stay super lean year round all the time? Cause you got so many eyeballs on you online or just cause that's just how you, you feel like you're supposed to be or a million reasons why someone might want to do that. But what are your general thoughts on the pros and cons there? All right. So the, the price of getting lean is going to be different for everybody before we get that, I want to say that I really enjoyed this

hypertrophy talk. Me too. I really, really enjoyed it. And I also don't want people to think that I am, like, super on one side of the camp because I don't think the research is there to be super myopic because it's just not there. What I really want people to do is just if you're putting effort in the weight room, I think that you're doing the right thing. Um, and eventually you'd probably

want to just diversify that effort. Uh, now if you're trying to get jacked and get lean, a lot of people don't understand the cost of that. And the cost of that leanness might not, might be that you're not going to adapt. And that is the biggest detriment that I see, because if you look at, and it's going to be the inter-individual variability of the price of getting lean is so high. Like some that's, we don't know why some people fight weight loss at a guy might fight weight loss at 17% body fat. I've seen this. It's absolutely ludicrous. And it's also related to how high you got previously. That's something that a lot of people don't because your, your brain responds, it thinks that the most amount of fat that you've had in your body is safe. So if you got up to, if you're a dude and you got up to 35, 40% body fat, that's what

your brain thinks of as home. And so now you drop down to 20% body fat, it's thinking you're starving. And so that's where it's really all relative. And there's a ton of inter-individual variability. So someone who's been lean their whole life, they've never worried about anything. And now they're 7% body fat to the gram. They might not have a problem, but they also might, you might get their lab work and they might need to be hospitalized. So there's a ton of variability in this. What I do think is like, you should know the best, the best way that we have to measure

this is like motivation to train it's palm scores it's it's like it's just how how do you feel are you are you easy to anger the other big thing is like libido like do you even want to have sex uh oh yeah and you talk anyway sorry you talk to you talk to anybody lots anybody what's like like what's one of the first things to go like man i'm not having sex for me anymore that's a rat for me i'm out same thing like like i've i've gotten i'm like some of my friends are professional a lot of them are professional bodybuilders like one of my best friends his goal is to win the olympia and he might fucking do it uh and and so i i see what those dudes have to do and i've i've gotten to

the point where i would have to start a diet. Like, so I've gotten to around 7% body fat. Like I'm starting to get, I'm starting to get cut up. And they're like, good, this is where you'd start. I'm like, nope, this is where I'm at. I'm gone. And so, because you do see this dysregulation of pretty much everything. And a lot of it is psychological.

Like, yes, you have the downregulation of of pretty much everything and a lot of it is psychological like yes you have the down regulation of thyroid hormone potentially you have the down regulation of all your gonadal axis is uh in males and females right and then and you got you got cortisol potentially going up and it's not the environment where you would get hypertrophy so if you talk to high level bodybuilders they're not expecting to make gains when they're on a cut. They're just trying to maintain as much muscle mass as possible. And we found that if you do everything right, you can do that. And that's pretty cool that you can get down to these essential fat ranges and maintain your amount of muscle mass and maybe

even maintain your resting metabolic rate. But talk to these, talk to these, talk to these people. They're cold. They're, they, they're either never shit or they're, they got diarrhea, right? They don't want to have sex and their life is pretty much grumpiness and they don't want to see anyone. They're antisocial because as a human being, that's what that you get a lot of those sickness behaviors because you are starving. And you're, you're also insanely food focused. So a lot of these people who are 7% for the gram, or if you're a female, maybe high teens, low, like maybe 15% body back, women are starting to look pretty cut up. Um, maybe 17. That's where I think you get into people who have, they're getting 15,000 steps a day. They're extremely food focused.

They're under eating. They're not there. I don't expect them to adapt their training because they're in a suboptimal state. If you think about like relative energy deficits in sport, all the things that can happen with that are bad news bears. And if you're a super nerd for females, it looks to happen at 30 K cows per kilogram of fat-free mass and it maybe

it happens for guys at 25 kcals per kilogram of fat-free mass on the energy availability so that's where you start getting all these bad just all this bad shit happens i feel like i still get uh these like rude awakenings every once in a while when i hear ron go on Joe Rogan's show and say that he stood on his final Olympia stage at 0.33% body fat. I mean, is that real? He said that he got the water, whatever it was. Yeah, like he did the water test. He was 0.33. And his off season, he wasseason, he was chunky at 3%. That was his off-season. How many people lift weights, fell in love with lifting weights because Ronnie Coleman just dominated the world for eight straight years?

A bunch. Yeah. I mean, there's not a single person that's ever looked at Ronnie and been like, pfft. I think, personally, those dudes, that era took it. I mean, and I think he's awesome but I think they went too far you know Kai Green and I mean this is opinion

like I'm not saying 100% factual that they did but you know like I look to Arnold and like you know the Franco Colombo that generation is like something that even that's not attainable for a long long time but that's closer and like for a long, long time,

but that's closer. And, you know, if Franco Colombo was still strong, he's still deadlifting 765 when he was darn near about to compete. But then they got to where they were just taking it so far. And people started dying right and left. I think it just went, you know, I guess that's just the way sports are. You're going to push that emblem, I guess, but too far for me. One of my buddies, one of my buddies put it really, really,

really well on the top echelons of bodybuilding. You really, I think that you get a lot of people who are genetically gifted. And like you look at Flex Wheeler, Ronnie Coleman, all these dudes, they even before drugs, they were jacked. Yeah, sure. Coleman, dude, that, they, even before drugs, they were jacked. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Coleman, dude, that, the new documentary where Coleman's veins are popping out of the, his tights before he was a bodybuilder. He didn't even know what it was.

He just wanted a free gym membership. And so I think at the top. It was Phil Heath. I saw a picture of him playing basketball in high school and he's just jacked as shit. Just totally, he looks like a bodybuilder already he's not as big but he looks he looks the part yeah you have to to get as get as jacked as those dudes you needed to start it you know when they're in high school they had to be the person where everybody's like oh my god when they walk by because i mean now they're at the point where is that a comic book character that's walking

you know those guys like so cena's trainer when we were down in arkansas with him and he was talking about how i mean cena was 17 and he looked like he looks right now and he said it's even it's even freakier because as you were talking about earlier ben he stores all of his fat if you look at him he probably looks like he's walking around at six percent and i'm sure his actual it's like a 11 12 but he stores all of his fat and his back so it just looks like more lats and then he stores it in his quads so he just looks stronger and if you walk over and were to just like massage his traps he like significantly more than most people just swells up.

So it costs him nothing but a few pushups to just turn into a freak show and go out and wrestle for 15 minutes. He's just, he's been that guy his whole life and it's just, you're a genetic freak. And those people exist. Like that. Like if you look at the F of them,

I exist too. Dude, it's awesome. Like people get mad about it. I'm like, they get F of my mind. They exist too. Dude, it's awesome. Like people get mad about it. I'm like – they get on the natty witch hunts. And I'm – like my best friend is like – he's a 27, 28 F of my – like I hate him most of the time. But homeboys – homeboys, my height and 235, 12 to 13% body fat.

And I mean he's been – you can can lie detector him i got all his labs i can show him to you homeboys like there was a point it was really funny on his last bodybuilding show i was on a game phase and we weighed almost the same he was his stage weight was like 192 and i almost got him i almost weighed more than him for it, which is crazy because he walks around at 235 to 240. But once you get into, so I think that you have the top echelons of bodybuilding. This is, this is one of my, one of my boys really brought me into this. I think that you have people who are genetic freaks and their ability that they don't need a lot of drugs and they get absolutely massive. And then you have the other side of it, people who can take a massive amount of drugs and stay healthy, which kind of blew my mind.

All right, so you got these two continuums. You got these genetically gifted motherfuckers who can just take 20% of what a normal person would take and they're just giant. And then you got these other people who can take 5X what the normal person could take and not die. And so that kind of blew my mind, the other end of that spectrum. Or not die yet.

That's the problem. That's the problem. You see that in powerlifting too. Like, you know, a lot of my buddies, like, I have lost in the last, like, two years, I have lost at least 10 friends, you know, that I powerlifted with. And, like, you know, and, like, you might not die yet. They don't know 20 years from now, are they going to be dying at 60? You know, like, so I would, like, you know,

the guy who's taking the least amount – and I would even challenge a lot of those dudes who say that they're able to take that much, do you need to take that much? I mean, like, I have a friend, I won't name his name, but, like, you know, he, like, who was competing against me, who started taking more and more and more and more to try to beat me. He wasn't going to beat me. have a friend i won't name his name but like you know he like uh who was competing against me who started taking more and more and more and more to try to beat me he wasn't gonna beat me you know

like it wasn't gonna it wasn't in the cards and so like he just started you know he thought if he took more and more and more he would win and like nothing was happening and so like yeah he was able to take five times whatever but nothing was happening so like what was the point of taking five times now i would i would i think guys like ronnie coleman you know that's the wise thing you can see a lot of most ex-paralyzers can't have kids obviously i'm spitting them out like i i need to stop and so but like uh you know you see the ones who have gone too far and then once you just like either didn't or you know or didn't take near as much and i think there's a point of you know just like you said earlier that there's a point of note you

know diminishing returns i think those dudes taking five times i don't think it's helping them you know i think they're you know sure but you know there's no there's no studies i don't think that would agree with one of us or not but like i just think that you know i don't think that would agree with one of us or not, but like, I just think that, you know, I don't think there's a point to it. I think, you know, like once you're like taking 10,000 milligrams test a week, I mean, is there a point to that? I don't think so. You know, but. All you're going to do is die. Ever a point to anything we do? No, no.

I got to think also, Travis, you're talking about people dying. Someone that's willing to take the maximum amount of steroids they can push into their body is also willing to do all kinds of other stuff. And they're going to take the maximum amount of cocaine before they go lift also. And then, for example, you can think of – these are extreme people that want to do extreme things. And some of them might be doing it for healthy reasons, but some of them might not be doing it for the healthiest reasons. Maurice Puzanowski, you remember when he popped for straw man, not for steroids,

but for cocaine. The same dudes, yeah, you're right. You're totally right. The same dudes who are willing to take 10,000 milligrams of tests or have no problem with taking, I don't know what the dosage is for cocaine, but they have no problem taking a big mound of cocaine. Oh, they have no problem taking scar-faced loads of cocaine.

Yeah, a lot of people get arrested for steroids. They got arrested for having cocaine, and then the steroids just like happen to be there. Be there as well. Rarely like go after them for steroids. It's usually some other harder drug, and then they get confiscated. lot yeah you had a heroin needle in your arm but oh wait there's some well how do you suggest people kind of go about the process of losing body fat because like that is never going away it's if you know there isn't a single person that doesn't want to look

leaner and look stronger we figured out how to get, put on muscle, but you've got a really difficult process of actually losing the body fat to make yourself look like you work out. I would argue with the more, like a lot of people will come to me and they think they want to get lean. I'll make the argument that you need to get jacked first because the more jacked you are, the less lean you have to get to look jacked. Like you look, some dudes, some dudes can look really, really jacked at 13 to 14% body fat. You're like, wow, just because of where they hold fat. And so that's where I think the bigger you are, the less lean you're going to have to be. And the problem with trying to get lean is you're living in a world of restriction inside of a world of abundance. So you're, you're living in a world of restriction inside of a

world of abundance so you're you're gonna have a straightening you're gonna have to hold just like you're gonna it's gonna be hard whereas if you think about gaining muscle you're living in a world of abundance inside of a world of abundance so that's a lot I want to spend the majority of my time in that world because it's a lot easier I can eat cereal cereal. I can have fun. I don't have to be weird. But if you want to get super shredded, you're going to have to be weird. Your life is going to have to be, there's going to be some changes that just have to happen. And so you got to be in an energy deficit. How you get that is the best way is going to be dietarily.

I don't think you can drive a ton of weight loss like you want to see with all exercise, and you're going to run yourself into the ground pretty fast. So most of this is going to happen with nutrition, eating less, and how much. If you're already pretty lean, you don't want to lose weight too fast because then you'll lose muscle mass. But all those rules, like we talked about, how Ronnie might have gotten able to get to 0. But all those rules, like, like, like we talked about how Ronnie might've gotten able to get to 0.33% body fat. All those rules kind of go out the window when you get into the drug world. Like it's just, but people think it's easier. It's not, you just, and I don't deal with, this is not my clientele. Like I'm not dealing with drug, drug, drug bodybuilders.

Like, and not that I have anything against that. It's where, if you want to win that, if you want to play that game, it's a game you've got to play. But a lot of people, you don't need – those same tactics aren't going to work if you're trying to go – well, they could. But if you're trying to go from 13% to 8% body fat because you want to look good for the summer, or if you're a female trying to go from 25% to 17% body fat, you want to – if you're not, if you're natural, you want to take it slower. You don't want to lose weight super fast. You want to hopefully maintain your strength and your ability to move weight in the gym.

And then understand that some of this stuff might get dysregulated or it might not. Just keep your eye on it. How long should you stay with one singular goal? Like if you're wanting to be jacked, have a lot of muscle mass, and be lean at the same time, like if you've been trying to gain muscle mass for a full year or two years or three years, like how often should you back it down, try and get a little leaner and then go on to build more muscle mass and then potentially repeat that cycle? Yeah, here we get into like the windows of health. And so I think there's different, there's different approaches. I'll argue for

like nine to 15 or maybe even nine to 18% body fat. So like oscillating between those and, and that's where I'll play with. And so if you females, this might be mid twenties to where you potentially get some type of dysregulation in your menstrual cycle. Um, and females have females guard weight loss, potentially a lot harder than males. And that's where I think this is not that it's not dangerous in males, but in females, like they see these CrossFit athletes who, who are that anomaly. Like we do have some women who can maintain their periods and their menstrual cycles at 12 and 13% body fat. They exist.

But then, and then, cause like you just take a large enough population, you're going to get those outliers. Uh, and then you have some women who lose their period at 22 to 23% body fat. Uh, and I understand that that's not fair, but that's kind of just the way it is. Uh, and why maybe like early fetal microenvironment, early, early life exposure, maybe your body just guards your fat threshold a little bit higher. And so the other crazy thing about females is 50% of them, even if they haven't, if you're an exercise and female and you're in the lower body comp ranges, even if you have a period, you may not have ovulation, which is wild. So even though you're regular, you may not actually be ovulating, which is crazy. And we like, you need ovulation

strips. I've never actually never even done that with a client, but you need ovulation strips to check for that. And so that's where we have to, the windows for men are probably like, if you, if you look at Ryan, like we tracked his, um, we tracked his testosterone and all of his, all his thyroid, everything. You want me to share the screen? Let me share it. He said I could share it. Oh, man, you got to let me share the screen. You just got to give him power. I don't know. If I give you hosts where you can share the screen,

I'm not sure if it turns the recording off. I'm not going to play with it. All right, so his testosterone went from in the 500s when he got on stage, he was at 121, right? And so he started, but he started to get a significant drop right when he got under 9% body fat. And so that to me is like probably in his cuts, that's where his window is. Somewhere around 9 to maybe 14 or 15% body fat is where you're going to start having more inflammation, maybe get into some nutrient partitioning ratios, the problems, maybe some insulin resistance, things like that, just because you have too much fat on board. So those would be my long answer. Short answer is

you want to stay where you could potentially be metabolically healthy. The top end of that, maybe 15 to 18% for a guy, maybe even 20. If you can show me that you're not metabolically dysregulated. But I don't think that there's you got some bodybuilders who at a certain point if you're natural and you want to get big you probably play with getting a little bit fat. Because

who has the highest FFMIs naturally? Sumo wrestlers. So if you don't cap the fat you can put on a lot more muscle yeah they used to be more popular like 20 years ago before you were doing the the everyday instagram stories thing a lot of guys don't do like big bulks and big cuts now because they they do have to be um ready for photos like real professional bodybuilders they have photo shoots year-round and it's just not this is not the way that happens in the same way anymore.

Yeah, you got sponsors. You got to look the part 365 days a year. Lee Priest used to get huge. I mean, back in the day. He did. He got fat. He got super fat. He had a round face, kind of like my face.

But, yeah. He got huge. Those are great photos. Anyone that just heard that, you should go Google Lee priest before and after photos they're they're fantastic unbelievable he's got the best one of those you know with arms above your head he's got the massive forearms but that dude got jacked and so yeah that's something it totally makes sense most of the bodybuilders from my era used to have those uh stages of life where they got pretty darn fat you know um my partner, my business partner, he used to get super fat and then he would get super ripped. Every time,

it would definitely add a lot more muscle than the guys who were trying to stay. They would gain a little bit, but not too much. I felt like he had the bigger gains. On the opposite side of that, I feel like anytime I've trained with high school or collegiate wrestlers later on, they have a really hard time adding muscle because their body's so used to just processing it, and it's almost been fearful for it to put on weight because it's so bad for their sport.

But we had a lot of people that would roll through the gym that would come in to play CrossFit and be like, well, what do I need to do? And I'd be like, well, you're in gym. What are you going to do? Do more burpees? But then they'd come in and be like, they can't snatch 100 kilos because they just can't put on – their body has been trained to belittle

so much that they struggle to go the opposite way, which, you know, it's, it's not as common. Yeah. You got like, anytime you're in a weight restriction sport, you got a lot of disordered eating. So there might be a lot of things that you're not necessarily seeing there. And the, the big thing that I like, I love, I love what you said there, Travis, because I, like the Lee priest area of the seafood diets where you just got fat and you made sure that you were in excess of calories I see the opposite thing happening now is like we're trying like you got dudes on a book and they're trying to gain like one pound a month I'm like dude how could you know if you gained one pound in a month are you telling me like you can pick

up that variability on the scale and so this is one of the other arguments in the bodybuilding world is like how fast how fast should you gain? I'm in the camp where you probably want to gain three-ish pounds a month because at least you can know that you're gaining weight at that point. Yeah. That's good. That's a good amount. Three pounds. We said three pounds per month. Yeah.

If you're a dude. Yeah. Otherwise, you're trying to track one pound weight gain on a monthly basis. That could just be water. Like you just ate less and less. You just ate more the next day. Yeah. I could gain three pounds per day if I wanted to probably. That's a crazy thing. So early phase weight shifts, like if you cut and then this is something that freaks people out. So if you cut, and then this is something that freaks people out. So if you cut, you'll lose glycogen and water out of your muscles.

And so they've looked at this. So they did these crazy underfeeding and refeed studies where you gave someone 50% of the calories for three weeks and then gave them 50% more of their needs for three weeks. And there's some outliers there that put on upwards of 10 pounds of water. Like when they, when they underfed them and then refeed. So talk about like the crazy, the crazy mindfuck of all you do this cut. And then in a matter of a week and a half, all of a sudden you gain eight to 10 pounds of water. It's like, Oh my, it's like, Oh my God. Wow. It's like, it's like oh my it's like oh my god wow it's like it's like every it's like for every gram of glycogen your body stores you store three grams of water along with it or something

along those lines is that ratio and then and then you start between one and two kilos of glycogen in your entire body depending on how big you are so you got one or two kilos of glycogen going back into your into your system over the course of a couple days when you're refeeding and then you have to have three grams of water per one gram of glycogen that goes along with that. That's easily eight to 12 pounds. Let me ask you a specific, you know, my, my wife has a friend. She used to be at, you know, we just sold her house cause we're moving to Hickory, but our old neighbor,

who just started this, you know, she's you know, counting macros and just started her, you know, she's, you know, counting macros and just started her first fitness program and she's going hardcore and she gained like two or three pounds in the first couple of weeks. You know, you think that could have had, I mean, is, you know, did she lift weights before? Did you start lifting at the same time? Just started lifting for the first time during this time. Man, that DeMoss paper is absolutely ludicrous. The amount of like, for the first time during this time man that demas paper is absolutely ludicrous the amount of like for the first 8 to 12 weeks it's probably not even worth worrying about like body

composition stuff like if you dexter in body stuff like you got so much fluid shift from muscle damage and just like overall like swelling and stuff like man you're gonna see so much variability that's why i think 12 like maybe not that much if she's not if she's if she's how much does she weigh like 140 150 pounds she's probably in that area you know she's a i mean she's a she's a i'm not she's definitely not obese she's a typical she's a pretty housewife mother that's you know a little bit fluffy from having you know three kids but like you know she's still pretty darn fit. That's about where she's at.

Yeah, I think you're really – I'm trying to get – when I'm working with a weight loss client or a weight gain client, I'm trying to get them out of those early phase weight shifts. Yeah, okay. Because that's – the other thing is I have to get them out of that. So say they're a five-day-a-week di they're, say they're a five day a week dieter. Cause if they're a five day a week dieter, I know they're constantly living in the chaos of those, of those early phase weight shifts. And I'm, I'm just playing with fluids and I got

so much noise in the equation that it's going to be really hard for me to see anything. For a few weeks. Okay. And if she's, if she's gung hoho, and not only does she have these fluid shifts of early phase weight loss, which is pretty chaotic, she also has the fluid shifts of a mass amount of muscle damage and all that stuff that's going on there. All right. Thanks.

That'll be a big help. She's pretty disappointed because she's just now started going all in. She's working out. She's dieting. She's gaining weight. She's freaked out you know obviously so she's probably putting on water in her like it's she's probably put she's probably kind of inflamed because of all that all that muscle damage that would be that would be so then comes the art of kind of explaining that to her which is which is even more difficult than what's happening scientifically. And, and I will, I would generally try to ask, I would ask her about consistency because

consistency with food is, and movement is, are the bit, if we're after weight loss on in terms of the energy balance equation, I want to keep, it's, it's a crazy ass equation, right? That has a ton of variability and a ton of stop gaps on the system. But in the face of that massive amount of complexity, I want consistency. I need. And so if she's,

if she's doing the same, same time. So what you shouldn't do is change shit right now. Like don't change anything. Just stay consistent. And, and make really on, I would be,

I would be thinking about the energy inside like make sure that you don't have any like people are fat is really really sneaky in the diet like people like people don't count it very well like they think a tablespoon of oil is they think it's a tablespoon oil but it's probably three or four um they're not very good like please tell me let me show me your tablespoon of peanut butter and i'll just tell you that it's not 28 grams and so that's where i would i and i i would always i would always approach this like 100 a dieter it's it's not your fault that's your brain changing your subjective reality to give you the benefit of the doubt because it wants those fucking calories because it doesn't want to starve gotcha all right i'll let drew tell her i'm not doing that but yeah yeah i got enough to worry about i got i got about 30 crazy athletes i'm dealing with so you can deal with our neighbor

so yeah yeah i actually am interested for your athlete i mean i'm interested in kind of the results of your athletes but when you have have weight-specific sports, you know, like Hunter that's got to drop a weight class. Two weight classes. Two weight classes. Yeah. You know, that's really taxing on their body. And how do those act?

Olympic weightlifting. So we had an athlete, you know, Hunter Elam, who she was a 71, and then we noticed that 64 would be a better weight class to make a world team. She dropped down. She hit a lifetime PR. So that was good. Seven kilos. So she's got 15 pounds from her resting weight?

And she did it. And she hit a lifetime PR, total lifetime PR. Cleans her. It was great. And then we dropped. Then we saw that 59 would be the best place to make the Olympics. So we dropped another, and it worked out the first meet, and then it went to shit, you know.

And so now we've decided for this next squad that we're going to go, you know, 64 is probably where we're going to stay. I feel like, you know, at 71 she's a little bit, cause you know, we did the whole Dexa and checked out her true body fat. And so we, we discovered that, you know, 64 is probably where it's at for her. 71, where's she at? Can you say? Uh, it was high. It was like, I can't, you know, 21, 22. Yeah. Or more. It was maybe 23, 24. And like, it's hard to imagine because she's very can't you know 21 22 yeah or more it was maybe 23 24 and like it's hard to imagine because she's very pretty you know she's probably one of the prettiest way look she might be the

prettiest london way to live during the world and um it was surprisingly high and so 64 is no problem but then at 59 she was 64 she was like 16 17 yeah yeah she got and then then we took it to 59 now we're pushing it and now you're at 13 that's that's danger territory i remember her struggling to walk literally like when she's going to weigh in i knew that we might have been overreaching at the pan am games we're like she was her walking was an issue if she was walking to weigh in and even me as a coach i'm like man is this worth it you know and so like you know it's the olympics and so like if there was ever a time that was the time but like i was questioning and like i'm you know i'm the coach that's going to go for it

and there's a part of me that was like man if this was my daughter would i do this and i was quite i don't know and so but but we were definitely at the point where i didn't know and so but now you know that we're talking about the next squad i don't think we'll go there i think you know 64 is like the thing you can make it at 64 yeah next squad you know the only thing is she was right there last time it's just that there was a girl who had been there and so like it's a i don't know if you're familiar but like it's like a points thing so even though we might have beaten that girl at the very end she will have beaten us so many times that she will have accrued enough points to beat us so it just wasn't in the cards but one weight class down

there was a chance you know there was you know it was like it was the only chance we had and so we you know we went for it which i you know you know, you know, hats off to her. She was amazing for doing that. But like now this next squad, you know, we'll have two solid years where points won't matter. And then, you know, and then we'll be, yeah, I don't think she'll, I mean, this is me is I'm by sale, but I don't think she'll be beaten at that weight class at 64 for the next squad. That's great. I mean, you could,

this is completely outside of the box of what I would do with a CrossFit athlete, which is because they need glycogen. They need that. I mean, Paoli's got that paper in gymnastics. There's a couple papers now that you could potentially strip that glycogen down for a sport like weightlifting because they don't need it. Could it's like can i get that paper uh yeah i'll send it to you yeah like so you could take that water out um galpin might be a really good dude to talk to about like because like now you're talking about using hydration status which is not my expertise but if you can if you can get that glycogen off, you could potentially get her there real quick.

So, Galvin is my go-to. He was the one – I actually – either him or Lane Norton are my two go-tos. And, like, they helped us. You know, obviously, we did a great job. You know, we dropped down. We made it her first-ever world team. She's the only – I don't know if i'm 100 right and saying this i'm pretty sure but she was the only american who like rolled into this quad who had never made

an international team who made an international team and then we dropped down another weight class made an international team so so we did really well you know we like you know i remember so many people being like who are you you know like i'm the girl who beat beat you that's who i am but anyway but um you know we we did a really good job i'm sure they nailed it then i'm sure they nailed it i think we nailed as much as you could i mean dude she dropped the weight class and like hit a lifetime pr so total lifetime pr total lifetime pr clean jerk and she'd hit the snatch that she should have, like, you know, then we wouldn't have had to drop down. But, you know, should have, could have.

Anyway. Dr. Bedhouse, you're the man, dude. I love that we got to connect. Yeah. We're going to get out to Asheville. Mash and I live too close to you now. I'm not come do some bro research with you.

I'll bring my new favorite drink of choice. You see this. When are the people getting back together? All the bros getting back together to lift research with you. I'll bring my new favorite drink of choice. You see this. When are the people getting back together, all the bros getting back together to lift weights with you? Do you have anything on the table? We had the massive – we were going to do another study. We were going to do the gummy bear study where we're going to have dudes mash weights and then feed them 100 grams of gummy bears

and see what happened to their insulin. But that got killed by the COVID. I'll come do that for sure like i can't i can't think of like i'm trying to get people like give me your bloods i'll give you i'll give you 100 grand of gummy bears and then we'll see what happens with your insulin we'll see because my my hunch is like if you got a if you got people with a bunch of muscle mass they don't even need insulin to get rid of those carbohydrates oh my god uh i don't think anything insulin to get rid of those carbohydrates. Oh my God. I don't think anything would change because my body would be like, oh, you always eat 100 grams of body.

It would be interesting to compare those two values, post-training versus non-post-training. Getting the bros back together, I don't know. It's been a tough year for the event business. It's been a tough year. I have no idea when. Hopefully soon. I think we're all

itching for some social stuff. I hope so. Where can people find you? What's your website? Socials? All that fun stuff? At drbenhouse. You can find more at broresearch.com. It's what we do. We research highly trained individuals and we talk about this nuanced stuff

that matters for potentially less than 1 percent of the population but i love you i love you less than one percent of the population i just want to say that this has been a great time dude like yeah i'm on vacation i'm so glad i took the time out to have a glass of bourbon and talk to you and you know i'm gonna add you look this is a you. I'm going to add you. Look, this is a big statement I'm about to say, but I have Lane Norton, I have Andy Galvin, and I'm going to add you to that list. That's how much I value this conversation.

I appreciate that. I'm under those guys. I'm under those guys. This was so much fun. Earlier, I was quizzing you to see like, how good is this guy? I'm like, this guy's good.

This guy's, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. Doug Morrison. Ben, good to have you back. The two years was too long.

Thanks for coming on the show, dude. Yeah, dude. I'm so stoked. You're a North Carolina, North Carolinian. Yeah. yeah an hour away i can't wait you guys can stop in asheville on the way out to gatlinburg in like a month i gotta get used to

this accent this accent is amazing like this is i love it i'm i could the southern one i could listen to north like i lived in texas and like those those homies from east texas i could listen to them talk for a while i could could listen to these North Carolinians. I could sit at the grocery store. I could sit at the grocery store for hours. Dude, you can't even say North Carolinian without having that draw to it. I could take you to my mother, and honestly, you would think she's speaking a different language.

My wife, this is a true story, who's from North Carolina, but just so how much the difference is between North Carolina flatlands and North Carolina mountains. When my wife first met my mother, she looked at me and, like, she had no idea what my mother was saying. It took her a year to understand the dialect of the mountain women. So good. Yeah. Doug Larson, tell them where to find you. You bet. Find me on Instagram the mountain women. So good. Yeah.

Doug Larson, tell them where to find you. You bet. Find me on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you go over to barbellshrug.com forward slash store for all the programs, eBooks, nutrition and mobility courses to make strong people stronger. We'll see you guys next week.

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