Barbell Shrugged - Testosterone School w/ Ali Gilbert, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #626

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

A two-time Golf Digest Top 50 Golf-Fitness Professional & Trainer, Ali Weingroff has become highly sought after for her unique approach to training that combines nutrition, training, and lifestyle hacks to alter body composition and optimize metabolism.   Ali found her passion in optimizing men’s and women’s health working alongside industry-leading medical practitioners building an authoritative network to empower men and women with the proper understanding of what true health optimization is. She has founded AliWeingroff.com (formerly Ali-Gilbert.com), offering remote + local consulting + training services, as well as Metabolic Golf, the world’s most effective golf fitness training program. Her clientele consists of busy professionals who aspire to become stronger, optimize their health, plus conquer nutrition.   She lectures internationally and nationally on various health topics in both the medical and fitness arenas.   Ali holds a B.S. in Exercise Science from Springfield College, and holds certifications through the Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) Certified Level 3 Fitness Professional, NSCA as a certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist, FMS Certified Level II, CFSC, FRCMs & SFG 1.   Ali is currently sitting for her Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner Certification. She is regularly featured on podcasts and publications on the topic of testosterone, metabolism, and golf fitness.   Ali resides in Greenwich, CT & Jupiter, FL, and enjoys snowboarding, deadlifting, and strong coffee.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   Common misconceptions about testosterone What is testosterone school Why you should get functional diagnostics completed The most optimal way to increase testosterone How does sleep and training affect testosterone   CHECK OUT TESTOSTERONE SCHOOL   Connect with our guests:   Connect with Ali Gilbert   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Allie Gilbert returns to the podcast. And today, we are taking you to testosterone school. We're gonna learn everything there is to know about testosterone today. And if you would like to check out testosterone school, she is launching that product at the end of the month. And you can get on the VIP pre-sale list

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super cool. So 2,200 stores, Walmart nationwide, the Walmart near me, I don't have it. And that's annoying. That means it's a whack Walmart, but the Walmart near you probably hasn't because we're in over half of them. So you can get over, get to the performance nutrition section in the pharmacy, Age of Smell, Pro-T, Zone, Pump, and Shred. Make sure you get over there. Look for my face on the box. Pick up some supplements and get your new year kickstarted, right? And friends, I'm so stoked. We have rollback pricing. Whoever knew that that was going to be a thing at Barbell Shrugged, Age of Smell, Pro-T. And friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders, protein. And friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson,

Coach Travis Mash, Allie Gilbert, back on the show. Welcome back. Today, we're gonna talk about testosterone school. I'm super stoked for this. My first question is, why does testosterone school not exist yet? I feel like there has to be a testosterone school on the internet, but you're doing it.

What a great story. Yeah, like you would think that that existed. So our friend Sam Miller, um, was the one who actually pushed me to do this. Like, I think it was in the spring or the summer. He was like, he's like, dude, like, why aren't you doing this by now? Because people are always, always asking, like, do you have a resource? Is there a book I can read and blah, blah, blah. And frankly, you can't really teach this stuff anywhere or learn this stuff anywhere, unless you go through like hormone optimization courses, which they do have. But to start at like a base level, like, okay, what is testosterone? Why is it important? Why is there this like

crisis for men? Nobody's actually provided that information. Well, that's a real thing because it's like 5 million plus men, somewhere in that 5 million number range of men in the United States alone have low testosterone, low testosterone symptoms. So it's like a very widespread problem. But how come you being female, this is actually, you're like the perfect person to ask. I feel like women have been talking about their hormones forever. Women own the hormone conversation and now dudes are showing up. And now all of a sudden, what changed? Like why is, why is, well, one, why haven't guys been able to talk about balancing hormones?

And then why is it becoming so popular? Yeah, it seems that women and menopause and hormone replacement is so much more socially acceptable. And women in general talk about their issues more openly and socially than men do. You guys are not necessarily hanging out in the gym together being like, dude, like, you know, I can't finish and like, I can't really get it up half the time. And like, you know, I woke up with no boner. Like no one talks like that as a man. I do. I have a 16 year old right, and it's just a disaster. Why? Yeah, well, nature doesn't want me to have all the testosterone right now.

And I just went through a ton of lab reports with Dan Garner and Galpin, and we uncovered a whole lot of things, which is what I'm really excited to talk to you about today. Where does the testosterone conversation start? There's the physiology side. There's lifestyle side. How do we start to just break into testosterone? Because the more I learn, the more all of a sudden, like, hold on a second, pump the brakes. I knew just enough to be dumb. And this conversation now it's like, it goes way deep

from, uh, just gut health. Um, the way you're sleeping, the amount of coffee you drink every day. It's a massive conversation with tons of components and variables. How do we start the conversation with people? Yeah, it's overwhelming to the point where you're like, yeah, like you said, oh, I thought I knew some stuff. And when I created the outline for testosterone school, I was like, oh my God, I got to cover this and this. And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And the conversation with a man is really starting with what you were talking about, which is kind of everything else, lifestyle related, training related.

When somebody comes to a coach, they are usually seeking something to help them feel better or look better or perform better, but they don't know really how to articulate that. Specifically men in the sense that they're usually seeking thyroid and testosterone, but they don't actually say that because they don't know that's what they're seeking. They just know they have very low energy. They don't feel like they used to in their teenage years. They may be experiencing some sexual dysfunction. They don't know who to talk to about that. They don't know if it's common, especially if you're under 40. Because guys under 40 think, oh, this is an old man problem. I hate to break it to you, but teenagers and guys in their 20s are showing up with test levels of guys in their 70s and 80s. Yeah.

Why? That's happening more and more as time goes on, though, right? Like, it wasn't like that 40 or 50 years ago. Like, why is that trending down? Right. Society, you know, our sedentary lifestyle. If you think about basically how we grew up in the 80s and 90s, we had to roll the window down in the car. We had to get up to change the channel on the TV for all five channels, blow into the Nintendo cartridge.

We had to actually physically do stuff that we no longer have to do anymore. We can sit on the couch and press buttons. So all these traits of men and a typical umbrella masculine male, things that usually building, fixing stuff, we don't need that anymore because we can press buttons for technology to do that for us. So now all of a sudden, male traits and skills are not needed as much. So if you don't use it, you kind of lose it. Add to that sedentary lifestyle, add to that very poor diet quality, which has kind of shifted since like the World War II, agriculture, all that stuff, xenoestrogens. We can go into depth of all this stuff, but I'm just going to name the list.

Exposure to less testosterone in the womb. So men and women becoming more equal, all these things have now switched the role of a man to where guys are more confused than ever. And more guys are being raised by females. More guys are being educated by females only. And there is a movement telling men masculinity or acting like a man is not good. So then that's being ingrained into their brains. And so all of that together. Are there actual studies that show being raised by a woman versus being raised by a man and a woman or just a man affects your physiology like that? Where if you're raised by a female, your testosterone is lower?

Is that what you just said? No, I didn't say their tests drop. So it's more, and I was talking to Dave Lee, who I had interviewed for my testosterone school the other day about this. I think he has actual studies on it. He has to give me the list for his references, but he was saying because the primary educating figure in most men's lives are female, in addition to a lot of the single parent households, similar to when women grow up without a father figure. If men are growing up without a father figure, that's going to have a certain type of impact on them. But the main problem is in the womb, they have more exposure to fake estrogens through

xenoestrogens, through products, stuff like that. So they're being born with smaller penises. They're not developing to full puberty. They have a shorter anogenital distance, which is the distance between your testicles and your anus or the taint, right? So that's all of a sudden getting shorter. So that's feminizing men. So they literally are coming out of the womb more feminine than they have in years before because of the exposure to this. And it's actually fascinating to the point where you're like, okay, that's bullshit. Like, okay, fine. We used to think like using, you know, glass and stainless steel was only for like earthy,

crunchy woo woo stuff. And now we kind of know, oh my God, that's like reality. Those are things we should actually be paying attention to. Is it going to make or break everything? No, but it's a little bit of a contribution that you can make to change your lifestyle. If you are, I wish I could remember the lady's name, but there's an episode of Rogan. I'm sure if you Google Joe,

like what's her name? Shauna Swan, Dr. Shauna Swan. Insane. So the, the, the briefest recap, I guess, it's like the distance between the scrotum and the anus, the taint, if the closer that gap gets,

the more likely you are, and this has been proven, she's measured like thousands and thousands of taints, maybe tens of thousands of taints, sexual dysfunction later in your life and your inability to have children or be fertile is dramatically affected. It all comes down to basically plastics. Guess what? In all of my tests that came back, high plastics. I'm like a glass and Yeti human. It's terrifying. Where do I get a ball?

Isn't that crazy? I don't know where they come from. It's probably from owning a gym back in the day. Probably, it's from CrossFit. Can we say that? Can we pull up, bring more plastic in your body? She spearheaded one of the studies I used to reference in my talks, predicting fertility in men to be non-existent by the year

2046, 2048. So now she had written a book called Countdown referencing that study because even she was skeptical when she was told some of this literature about the taint being smaller and sperm production decreasing 60% in the last few decades and all that stuff. So she wanted to do this study and she was like, holy shit, this is actually true, wrote this book and has been on various different podcasts. She's a sweetheart of a lady. And so I've read that book and I've used a lot of the references in testosterone school because it's absolutely mind blowing that a pregnant woman can have an effect on her future son's sperm production just by what she exposes herself to knowingly or not knowingly.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the studies that she talked about that really freaked me out was the babies that were born premature and the number of tubes that they have down their nose and throat to feed them and keep them breathing, whatever. I don't know all the intricacies of the tubes. But if you have one tube, you had X amount of plastics in your body and in your urine. If you had two tubes, it was 2X. If you had three tubes, it was 3X. So for each tube that went down your body, there was that multiplier of plastics getting into your bloodstream, getting cleared out through your urine. And there's just really no way that your body would be able to keep up with the cleansing or the getting the plastics, the clearing the plastics out of your body

if you spend the first four months of your life with a bunch of tubes. So it just stays there? So the plastic just stays there and never goes away? I think her point was that, one there's like a very clear correlation to um the amount like just a plastic exposure and how much we don't know is going in like you get when you can test it to that multiplier but then because plastics are such a big piece of our lives it's like you have them for the first four months when most kids are just breastfeeding and aren't really exposed to this stuff but then you get into real life where it's just everywhere. So you end up just developing

this problem that carries on through your life unless you are randomly lucky enough to meet Allie and do all the testing or randomly lucky enough to go and do all the stuff, all the diagnostics that you would need to actually understand what's going on. Most people just don't have those resources. So you can carry this problem through your whole life. You recommend just throwing away all plastic stuff? Like, how do we avoid this? I'm freaked out.

I got two boys. I'm about to burn my house down. He's about to go measure some paint and find out what's going on. Yeah. Rock there. Let me measure that. I got this tool. I was on this podcast today.

Oh, my God. I always joke, because, you know, the ring finger being longer than your index finger means you had more exposure to testosterone. But now the new thing to measure is to go home and, you know, measure your taint. There it is. Which, hey, I mean, you know. Hey, you can report back to Anders. Send him an email with a photo. You can never be too sure. They see you.

Boys will be in the locker room comparing taints. Let me show you a real taint, boys. The toad, the grundle yeah oh my god growing up i was i was gonna say growing up i pretty much had like an almost 100 association between hearing about testosterone and having it be associated with steroids just like the you know like the mark mcguire barry bonds days like steroids testosterone etc were like almost exclusively associated with cheating or being a cheater and so i feel like that's still prevalent in society to a large extent but i feel like now there's been some separation between testosterone being only what cheaters do and

testosterone just being like this normal hormone that everybody has and you want to have an optimum amount of it to feel good etc and it's becoming a lot more normalized where people are more comfortable with it where where now it's not like you're a bad person. If you, if you're trying to optimize your testosterone, like, have you, have you seen a similar shift? Oh my gosh. Yeah. And, and so many guys will feel, okay, I have to conquer this naturally as best I can before I give in air quotes. And, and I don't think it's more so a giving in. I think regardless if you, if you go on testosterone or not, you're going to have to do something with your lifestyle. And, you know, like Travis was saying, it's so overwhelming. Like, are you supposed to clear

out everything in your life? And you can go down so many rabbit holes, like, you know, getting rid of like EMFs in your bedroom. Like, okay, listen, we all have to like live in real life. There's no way to avoid any of this stuff. But I would say, what are the things that you do every single day? You put some sort of product on your body, male or female. So let's use products that don't have dangerous things like phthalates and parabens. And as a guy, you guys need like three products. That's it. Like max, you know, and women, we really don't need as many as is marketed towards us, but you can now more readily find something that is paraben free, phthalate free, especially if you're using like a moisturizer or something that's going on your skin for, for women, makeup,

for guys, makeup, whoever. That would be one area to conquer. The next would be... The parabens and the phthalates, can you spell that? Phthalates is like P-T-H-L. Is this a trick question? Yeah. I'm literally writing it down.

P-H-A-L-E-T-S. L-A-T-E-S. Phthalates. And then parabens are what? P-A-R-A-B-E-N-S. That one's phonetically spelled? Yes, that sounds like it is. Like those and, you know, if you're going to heat stuff up in the microwave,

maybe use glass or you can't use stainless steel, but use glass and try to drink, you know, water that's in stainless steel and stuff like that. But even then it's like, all right, well, if I have bottled water, get glass bottled water. Otherwise, if you're getting plastic bottled water, that's been on a truck sitting in plastic, like it would be great if we had xenotestosterones because then we'd probably all be a little bit more anabolic. But the problem is these plastic estrogens compete with the receptor in your body for natural hormones. And there are a thousand times more potent than a natural estrogen. So here we are bringing in fake stuff, competing at the receptor site and your body gets confused.

And that's when it starts morphing into more of a feminized person as a guy, because again, it's an estrogen. And it does affect women and their physiology as well, but we're talking about men. So what can men do? Change some of the products that you're using every day, and then maybe switch to glass and we can go from there. You don't have to do this complete overhaul of your life because it's not realistic. And there's only so much you can do aside from living a healthy lifestyle and all of that. Yeah. I feel like we got into plastics, which is probably like level four of what should be at the top of level one, I feel like I read a study or saw maybe it was Ben House that posted a study saying that like, obesity really is the number one thing that we need to be focused on

when it comes like, I want to say there was a meta analysis recently that came out to that said, like, the number one indicator of high testosterone, muscle mass, the number one indicator of high testosterone muscle mass the number one indicator of low muscle mass fat mass like if we could just start there we could likely solve many of the problems with getting down to a healthy body weight living living in a uh in an ecosystem that promotes being healthy getting up moving and walking um is is that really like where this whole thing should start? Because TRT is like down the line. Plastics are down the line. How do we just get people to bring awareness to the fact that their ecosystem sucks and plastic's a piece of that conversation? It is having that conversation first.

Okay, TRT would be in the category of supplements. So everyone wants the supplement. Okay. We can supplement when we start eating food. All right. What are you eating every day? Are you one of those people who is scared of eating meat or you think that plant-based is the way to go? Blah, blah, blah. Let's look at your micronutrient intake. Let's see what you're actually getting. Do you even take a multivitamin? Before we even have any conversation, a multivitamin is like the most basic, but most unsexy, most boring, but probably most necessary because we can't get what we need through food anymore. Then are you moving enough? People used to not move at all in the pandemic. It would be like, go outside first thing, get your face in front of some sunlight so you can actually

normalize your circadian rhythm, maybe go for a walk, and then we can work on the rest of the day. Step goals are a thing for a reason because people clearly don't move enough. So getting somebody to resistance train is also an added bonus. Like I posted the other day how like the easiest thing you can do is walk and people overcomplicate that because they're like, how do I start walking? You just go out the door and just start moving. You don't have to walk for four hours, but I would say do an appreciable amount of time and build on that. Just move. Just move. We need to get people just to move instead of glorifying certain

body types and all that. It doesn't matter if you're moving. Get somebody moving, have the conversation about what they need to be eating based on what their movement profile looks like, what their activity level is. Are you even sleeping? What is your stress? There are so many things like you were saying that we have to peel back before we even explore the other stuff. And personally, my opinion is it's inevitable that all men will end up and should end up on testosterone replacement because we're not going to win the war against all these environmental factors, but it's not a panacea. You still have to address everything else. It's not going to be that magic pill that guys want

it to be. They want it to be that. Very similar to a lot of coaches, when they don't know how to get someone results, they think it's a hormone thing. And then they do lab work when they don't know how to get someone results, they think it's a hormone thing. And then they do lab work and they don't know how to read that lab work. And then it's like, throw in the towel. Well, maybe they just needed to eat less because I don't know. So it tends to be very overcomplicated when starting with the basics still works. How does sleep play into testosterone production? I know it's a massive piece to just overall wellness, but specifically to testosterone, how does sleep play into this? So you know how when you're deprived of sleep, you crave, like back in the day when we all used to go out and party and stuff, you crave sugary stuff, fatty stuff, hyperpalatable foods.

I used to get so excited to drink and then think I was sleeping till like noon the next day and like doing well. It's not even close. It's like the exact opposite is the reality. College. How dare you? How dare you cost so much for so much fun? Seriously. We were in Vegas like a couple of weeks ago for a wedding and I was like, this is the first time I've like gone to the airport sober to leave. Like, you know what? Like what's going on? We may have seen the sun come up. We still got it. We still got it, buddy. You guys are better than I am. That's the worst feeling watching the sun come up.

And you know what you've done at that point. Look, when you walk into McCarran at 5 a.m., half the place hasn't slept. So you're just part of the crowd. You're just normal. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And everyone's at the slots like their eyes are bloodshot. I saw you last night wearing that.

But when you're sleep deprived, like your body just cannot function in a way that it's going to force you to crave that stuff because it doesn't tolerate carbohydrates because you become a little bit more insulin resistant. So it's got to take all it can resource-wise and shove it to your brain to make it work so you can actually put one leg in front of the other. And the study they've done on guys was depriving them of five hours or less for about a week where it showed like a significant 15 to 20% drop in their test levels. So I think people like, you know, if you get one crappy night's sleep and you train that day, like, I think you'll be okay.

Good. You know, yes, we have aura rings. We have all these trackers. It's great to have, but you don't have to necessarily listen to it every single day. If you feel like legitimate crap because you have a new baby or you've been sleep deprived for a while, yeah, maybe we train once or twice. We don't have to train every day. But if you have one night of bad sleep, it's not going to all of a sudden plummet your test levels. You're not going to all of a sudden lose all your muscle mass if you train that day like it's okay. Yeah. It's a balance, right? It's the Goldilocks rule. Testosterone is produced at night. That's like the main time during the rhythm of your day where you're producing the

most testosterone, which is why you wake up with morning wood, right? Yeah. Or during the night, most guys have like... Yeah. If you're not getting the full seven to eight hours, you're just not getting all of the production throughout the night, most guys have like... Yeah. If you're not getting the full seven to eight hours, you're just not getting all of the production throughout the night. Yeah. And growth hormone too. How does growth hormone play into this? Yeah.

You just brought up a great one. Talk to me. It's produced that night as well, and that's your recovery. So you can train as hard as you want, balls to the wall in the gym. That's great. But if you're not sleeping and getting the growth hormone production at night to recover, then it's almost obsolete. That's why people really don't care about sleeping. And it's like this heroic thing to, you know, take a red eye and go straight to the gym. Like that's not sexy. I'm sorry, but you're not going to get results that way. Yeah.

Sure. What about jet lag though? I think, right? Yeah. A little bit on jet lag when you go and lift some weights. That's a whole different ballgame. Yeah. Definitely not getting jacked though. You're just trying to acquaint yourself. Yes, trying to like normalize it. Sorry, Travis, go.

What about peptides? You know how a lot of TRT places are pushing like peptides that are like, you know, I guess they're like growth hormone peptides. Are these good, bad? We don't know. So there seems to be a peptide for everything. Fat loss, sleep, you know, erections. So the thing with peptides is they used to be like you couldn't find them unless you got them online as research chemicals, right? And so now there's many pharmacies that compound them, that make them. And I would say the most popular ones are the growth hormone peptides that do not cause ravenous hunger, like ipamirelin or CJC-1295, and a healing peptide called BPC-157, which can be oral or injectable. I would say the BPC for

the oral form, I've personally taken that like for intestinal lining help, I guess. I had a parasite. If you have a parasite, it's very helpful for that, for ulcers, stuff like that. I think the jury is out on a lot of the other ones. Basically, the way they're formulated is like if growth hormone is X number of amino acids, then the peptide is missing one of them or maybe two of them. So it's close enough to where it's stimulating the production from the top down for your body to produce growth hormone. And it does help with sleep, but you have to take it two hours away from insulin because insulin opposes it. So you have to time it correctly. It can be a pain in the ass if somebody's traveling and you have to inject it every day, then you have to bring it with you.

So there's a lot of complicated parts moving with it. And if you take more than two peptides, they work best in injectable except for the BPC. But if you're taking more than one, it's multiple injections throughout the day. Does somebody really want to do that now? But they can work. I've seen like melanotan, which can make you tanner, also helps with blood flow and erection and libido. So a lot of guys will experience that. So otherwise, I don't consider myself

as somebody who is an expert on that just because I'd rather outsource it to somebody who is. Because I'm like, these keep coming up every year and there's so many of them. I was like, this is too exhausting to try to keep up. It is a lot. It is a lot. Every year, I feel like there's more and more

for men to, I guess, to improve some hormone or another. There's a peptide or something else. Yeah. For testosterone, I would say no. There's nothing really. If you need testosterone, I should say, just take testosterone. Yeah. Don't, don't go like Clomid or HCG or, or, you know, gonadaline, like some other route, just take testosterone. Like if somebody, a diabetic needs insulin, we're not going to say here, eat all this protein. So you can go this very complicated route of making glucose, just giving glucose, you know? What about like taking the HCG with the testosterone? Do you think there's a point of like producing one's own plus, you know, the synthetic version?

Some guys do well on it. So HCG stimulates LH in the testicles to produce testosterone. So it will maintain testicular fullness. And this is something I always like guys will say this in the TRT groups I'm in. And they're like, you know, all my, my balls are shrinking, which happens on testosterone. We don't care as a woman, just letting you know, like we really don't care. Like it makes the penis look bigger. Actually balls just get in the way, like whatever.

You know, like let's be honest. Yeah. Like we don't need that, but some guys care about maintaining it. Fine. Like HCG will do that because it will keep active the hormones in the testicles to produce testosterone. In case your girl loves balls. And you know what? Some of these guys claim that they're like, my girl loves big balls. And I'm like, can I like talk to her?

I mean, interesting, But yeah, the main use for HCG is also to maintain fertility. So if a guy wants to eventually conceive and he wants to stay on his testosterone, he can use HCG. It does help some guys with some mental health aspects. Other guys do horrible on it. They have horrible side effects on it. So that would be the only time. I would not encourage anyone

if they go to a TRT clinic and they send them out the door with both unless they have the fertility conversation because it's quite common to be sent out the door. I feel like to some extent, like TRT clinics are just like drug dealers. Like you're going to go in there, they're going to do some tests to say they did some

tests and then they're going to give everyone tests. Like how often do people really get turned away at your average TRT clinic? Like, no, you're good. Like you don't need our service. Like they're going to give it to basically everybody that walks in the door. Yes, especially if it's more of like a private practice type of thing, because to get approved for TRT through insurance is extremely difficult because they keep lowering the range for guys where you technically have to be under 300 or under 250 twice,

which there's ways to do that. But that's what you have to do to go through it, to get it approved through insurance. Whereas these places usually, if you're running low, which is, I would say under 500, then usually you will get approved. But they have what I call the starter pack, where they send you out the door with HCG and with an anti-estrogen, which you do not need. I've gotten into arguments with places down here because I use my poor husband as a guinea pig. I've gotten into arguments with places down here. Cause I, I use my poor husband as a Guinea pig. I'm like, just do blood work with these people. Let me see what their process is. And we go in and we go for the appointment and they're like, okay, so, um, we'll, we'll put you on HCG and we'll give you a Remedex half a milligram. And I'm like, no,

no, you're not. There's absolutely no reason. And he lost his mind because he knows from what I tell him. But I had this argument and now the owner wants to do testosterone school. Because I was like, listen, you can't be doing this. It's not necessary. And a lot of these places claim, well, we have to give a Remedex because the pharmacy says it's the law. And I said, tell me this alleged law. Call the pharmacist right now. I want to learn this law because so many of these other practitioners I consult with don't abide by this law. I don't think they're in jail.

Yeah, I get very worked up about that because these clinics do take advantage of guys and what they don't know. And they're like, you need all of this. They don't know why they need this. And then they come to the TRT forums and they're like, i'm taking your remit x i'm taking hdg i'm taking testosterone i feel like shit why don't we just start with one thing one yeah and see what happens right let me ask you this you know like what about for women you know like um in sports this is totally off the subject just a little bit but like HCG is not necessarily legal.

It's just there's no test. You can't test a woman for HCG because, you know, she could be pregnant. There's all these things that happen to East Germans. So, but like, does it help women? You know, let's say that a girl took HCG. Would it increase their own testosterone or would just be wasting time now it's so it is like you said the pregnancy hormone and women will take it for fertility reasons and you guys have heard the hcg diet which is crap so actually very hold on i have not actually oh it's the best what come on

try to stay off the internet dude it's easier for me to interview you and learn all the things than be on the internet and have to sift through all that mess. Tell me about it. 800 calories. Yeah, go ahead. So you eat like 500 calories a day and you inject HCG and you lose weight. It has nothing to do with the calorie deficit.

Because of the HCG, not the 500 calories. Forget that. Has some like magical fat loss property. So actually because of that, so in 2020, they actually renamed HCG from being a peptide into a biologic, which basically means that it's reclassified. So now certain pharmacies can't produce it.

And November 4th, Empower is one of the pharmacies that't produce it. And November 4th, Empower is one of the pharmacies that sent out a letter saying that they can no longer compound it and that there's this FDA ban and all this stuff. The HCG diet has to do with that. Now there's a lot of pharmacies that can still get it. It's a very weird thing. Not a lot of people know that this is going on. It's like a silent war on men's fertility, but because they wanted to pull doctors from selling HCG diets, this is part of what they have to do to ban the compounding of it. So yeah, the HCG diet, like, oh, crap.

Terrifying. I don't even know. And there's, you know, I've asked practitioners like, okay, so you sell them the HCG diet. Oh, yeah, it's a great moneymaker. Cool. So what happens after when they lose the weight? Then did they keep it off? We all know no. No, but then they come back to me in a few months,

and then they spend another couple grand, and they'll do it again. It's amazing. It makes you really wonder, you know the other true iqs in humans nowadays yeah like come on man you're starving to death of course you're losing weight you don't put two and two together as a monotherapy it's not recommended again if somebody needs testosterone put them on testosterone if it needs to be combined for fertility reasons, cool. How many of these issues are just solved with time? Like if you hit a, a, a, and you lose the weight, you start living a healthier life. Can we just, when does the TRT actually need to be applied to somebody's life

versus just, Hey, let's get you in shape. And most likely, with enough time and enough good habits, probably just get back to normal. Will that happen? Yeah. Is that – like when do we actually put the TRT into somebody and say, you have an actual dysfunction that needs to be solved through exogenous testosterone? I think when you exhaust all lifestyle angles,

and that's including nutrition, movement, training, all that stuff. Sleep. You may get them a bump. The most I've seen in one of my clients is 300 points, but it didn't last because aging does play a factor in that. Is that with lifestyle changes or is that with the the exogenous testosterone lifestyle only nutrition intervention all that stuff he eventually went on testosterone because that increase did not last similar to like weight training will give us an acute increase in testosterone but it does not does not last and it's usually not appreciable enough for someone to feel. But I think guys will think they have to go on it in

order for their gym stuff to improve, which, yeah, it might help you recover and sleep and all that. But again, we're talking about a hormone that you're deficient in. So if you're deficient in thyroid hormone, you're going to go on thyroid hormone. It may help your energy. It may help brain fog. It's not going to give you PRs in the gym. So very rarely is somebody like, oh my God, I'm smashing PRs left and right. And it has no effect on my recovery. It has nothing to do with my nutrition or anything just because they're on testosterone replacement. A lot of my guys who are on TRT, if you look at them, you would never know. It doesn't just magically change your body comp. You still got to put the

work in. As we all know, if you add other anabolic compounds, it really helps the recovery. So you can train more, add more volume, stimulate more muscle growth. It doesn't just make you explode into muscles. And so I think that has to be differentiated because guys will think, well, I've been on TRT for like three months and my gym performance is the same. Well, they're completely separate things. So I think once somebody has a dress, like, oh, maybe you're never sleeping. Cool. Now you're sleeping. Now you're eating like a normal person. You're getting in the gym. Yeah. Then, you know, we can put you on it because if they were still down in a hole they might have

needed more testosterone to get them going whereas now we don't have to give them such a high dose and they can get by with their regular therapeutic dose because again it's a therapeutic dose it's not a panacea it's just going to help you get to normal. This is where guys should be. What's a therapeutic dose? How much is a therapeutic dose? I mean, it varies. So like some guys, 50 milligrams a week on the lower end. There are some guys who have to go up to around 300 just to achieve symptom resolution. So I always tell them it's not a number that you're really searching for on paper. How do you feel? Because you can be 600 and feel amazing,

and you can be 900 or 1200 and feel horrible. So it's until you achieve symptom resolution, which is different for everybody. So with most guys, it's better sleep, better clarity, better focus, better energy, better vitality, and just winning and driving and that type of thing. It's not my bench press went up. I've got boners every five minutes. So yeah, your morning wood might come back. Sure. You might have better erections and stuff like that. But I tell you what, like a lot of guys at onset may feel better for a little bit. And then that stuff might go away until they can find what dosage works for them to where now they consistently have symptom resolution.

Well, they got it. I mean, eventually you do have to deal with your life. Like you can take more and more and more. But if you're not sleeping, like it's not going to matter matter i don't think you can outdose a terrible lifestyle i mean i've watched too many power lifters who are like taking you know exogenous um testosterone they were taking thousands of milligrams and shit was going backwards because they were living such a terrible life yeah i find people come to you for the wrong reasons. Sometimes we're like, you kept saying like, you could be on a high dose and still feel like shit.

Like maybe somebody they, they, they feel bad because of past trauma or like their, their, their mom died suddenly when they were like in conflict and they never got to apologize. And that like weighs heavy on them psychologically. And like, they're coming to you because they feel bad for one of a million reasons, like an extremely complicated thing and how, and how you quote unquote feel. There's many factors there.

They come to someone like yourself. They say, well, my testosterone, my totals, you know, 350 or whatever it is, you put them on now they're a thousand and they still feel like shit because it really, really the reason that they primarily feel bad has nothing to do with their hormones. They just had a different reason. Maybe optimizing hormones helped some areas of their life, but they still didn't actually fix the problem that they had because your solution wasn't the fix to that particular problem. Wow.

What a deep question, Doug. That is an amazing, I love that question. So that happened a lot during COVID. So on my intake forms, I actually ask questions directed towards past childhood traumas, events that have happened in your life that have caused stress just to start that digging process because people don't realize how that can come to fruition during something like this. So usually it forces them to reflect. People will say, wow, that was like a journal.

I had to really dig deep as to stuff that's happened in my life because they don't put two and two together. During the pandemic, when the height of stress came about, a lot of guys were questioning their dose and questioning, should they be on it? Because low testosterone symptoms are very similar to depression, very similar to being lethargic, low motivation, all that stuff. So it's very, very easy to be like, oh yeah, you're probably low T, like here, here's some testosterone, we got to fix that. It's a difficult conversation, but I'm pretty blunt with them in telling them, listen, we have

to confront this because otherwise it's going to be in the background because it's always going to be holding you back subconsciously, whether you want it to or not. And now as to how deep I can go with that with certain people, you usually feel them out because some people will be all for that. Some people, they don't want to address it. My military veterans are great at understanding that they have to address those things and they may have to find the right type of outlet for them to talk about stuff with a professional and then address the testosterone unless they've had a traumatic brain injury or had some sort of injury that caused them to have that pituitary trauma to where they're not going to produce testosterone. That's different. But when it comes to those traumatic events, it happens in food because people,

their behaviors around food, if they have to like clean their plate, it's because they were forced to as kids or they were reprimanded as kids. So stuff like that does come to fruition. So yes, I have to make sure I can decipher as to, is this somebody who is a candidate for TRT right now, or do they have yet to confront some of these underlying things that can be addressed through therapeutic outlets, nutrition and training and all that? That's a that's a fantastic question because i don't think enough people are willing to confront that stuff how many people do you know will actually say i have a lot of demons that i'm going to handle before i delve into something else very few start with the drugs then then figure it out after that i mean sometimes you have all the fun yeah well

sometimes the drugs allows you to think more you know rationally like this you know when you have low testosterone like she said it's very similar to being depressed if not being i mean i feel like almost that it is depression you know because like low testosterone you know leads to depression so you know sometimes you need the drugs first man like you know, cause like low testosterone leads to depression. So, you know, sometimes you need the drugs first, man. Like, you know, like if you got zero testosterone in your body, I don't care what counselor you're talking to, you're probably not ever going to feel better. So, and that's actually a legitimate thing to where, you know, I've had clients who are so deep in the hole. Like you ever talk to somebody and they're very, woe is me to the point where

you all of a sudden have like that empathy where you're like, man, I'm, I feel like awful right now just because of like how they're talking. You're like, oh my God, my heart goes out to this person. I've had guys like that to where they need to start testosterone just to get the motivation to not do something that's going to injure themselves. Yeah. And that will work through problems, you know? Yes. That will be the catalyst to get them started. And I've actually had two guys who have come off because they felt like,

okay, I can come off and, and maybe handle everything. And then they stayed off for a couple of years until eventually that they had to go back on. But it wasn't because they had to just get themselves going. Like they were actually able to achieve an ability to focus and get them, get their shit together, so to speak, enough to where they felt comfortable, where they don't have to necessarily rely on something. And then it can be their choice versus a necessity to get them.

I see a lot of power lifters who have been on when they're younger and then they want to all of a sudden have babies. And so they come off and like, they can't get past that first step of like being super depressed, you know? Because they've been on such high amounts too that they probably wrecked their testosterone,

probably won't be able to have babies if they've gone too much. But it's a sad thing to see yo if if you if you go from a a low amount we'll say 300 or whatever to a normal-ish amount say 800 900 something like that uh and then you come off like travis talking about people that are presumably competing to take this as many steroids as they possibly can because they're trying to win, you know, set world records and whatever else. So they're not like trying to optimize their hormones. They're trying to be extreme. And so they come off and they got problems.

But if you just go from low to normal and then you come off, like what kind of potential problems do you have? Or is it like you just go back to where you were and you're none the worse for wear? Great question. Yeah, it is a great question. So depending on the dosage and what they're on, so if we're going to say they were just on testosterone and they just wanted to get to normal, so they went from low to normal, if they achieved symptom resolution, if they come off, they're not going to feel so great because their test levels are going to maybe go beyond lower than what they were.

Because that's actually a trick. Like if you want to get tested and get really low testosterone scores, you can go on it for a little while, come off of it, your test will crash. Yeah. Because it screws up the rewire. I wouldn't know, but I've heard you have to do it. Oh, there's always hacks. Like, there's always hacks.

Is there? Yeah. Oh, there are. There are. And, you know, traditionally, like, you know, it's funny because when it comes to fertility, like, some guys can be on every single, you know, anabolic. Like, they can be on a gram a test.

They can be on, like, D-ball. They can be on, like, Mastrod. They can be on, like, you know, six different things and still conceive. And then you have a guy who's on like 150 milligrams a week and he can't conceive. I mean, everyone's different. Everyone's, you know, there's a lot that goes into sperm than number. It's how they swim and their ability to swim and the morphology and all that. Like it's kind of crazy.

So not all guys have to come off. Some people have Michael Phelps testosterone or sperm swimming in their, in their, in their seat. Because I've seen people who are taking so many drugs. I mean, they should have nothing going on and they're popping out babies. It's amazing. Yeah.

Isn't that crazy? Like, you know, you would think that you, they'd be completely sterile after that. They have some massive swimmers. It's true. It's true.

A few minutes ago, you mentioned TBIs and pituitary, et cetera. Like, how do you know if you're a person who has low testosterone because of concussions or you just, you're a boxer or a football player or whatever. Like how do you know that's the cause? Is there a way to test for that? And is there a way to fix the cause rather than just, just do more tasks because you're low? So most often like guys who transition out of the military, don't get hormone testing done.

They usually are handed their starter pack of antidepressants and Adderall and stuff like that to kind of get them back to functioning in society. So it's not until they actually do some hormonal testing, if they were near explosives or they know they had concussions and stuff like that, you're going to see an inability for the pituitary to kind of produce the downstream hormones that are necessary. And they're just going to see an inability for the pituitary to kind of produce the downstream hormones that are necessary. And they're just going to show up low no matter what. Then asking background history to athletes, like, have you ever had a concussion? How many? What was the protocol afterwards? What did they do for the inflammation? Because these are still things that not everybody knows how to

handle in addition to the hormone testing. And then you can figure out like, okay, is everything that we're doing helping? Is anything increasing? Are LH and FSH really high trying to tell the body to produce testosterone or are they still kind of suppressed yet the person's not on any exogenous hormones? So there's a lot of different test protocols that people can go through. But I do ask that too, like, have you had a concussion? Have you had a

TBI? Because they never associate that usually, because usually the symptoms after that are going to be more depression and stuff that you wouldn't consider coming because you had a head injury. Like no one thinks of that, like, oh, I had a head injury, or I fell off my bike, you know, when I was 13. And I've never been the same sense, but I didn't really consider that a big deal. I've often wondered about that, like I played, played high school and college football, boxing, kickboxing, I fought MMA for a number of years, I've been hit in the head many, many, many times, but I've never really been concussed. I've never had like a, an incident where like, I got hit really hard really hard and like I didn't remember my name or or like I didn't even know we played a football game that night I've had friends that have been like that we're

like you have the same conversation every five or ten minutes we had a football game tonight yeah yeah you got concussed you feeling all right oh yeah and then it just like goes over and over and over again like I've never been like that but i've been hit and had many times and i've also been told like at times like my luteinizing hormone has been low or my or my prolactin is like out of the range it's a little bit high and i'm like okay like i have pituitary issues but like they're not like really extreme is this like i because i got hit in the head or is it total coincidence like i don't know how to how to figure that out i figured it out hundreds of times i just keep doing it over and over again. Next time I see Allie, I'm going to be like, we should do a podcast someday. We've never done a

podcast before. This guy's got problems. Oh my God. Yeah. No, prolactin is actually one of the hormones that might be pretty high too, just because of the pituitary not acting as it should. And there are some guys that have benign tumors hanging out on their pituitary, and then that can be solved through an MRI. Some practitioners will freak if prolactin's just a little elevated and then put guys through a pituitary MRI, which is so scary if you don't tell them why you're doing it. So I've had guys, they're like, oh my God, my doctor has me doing a pituitary MRI. And they automatically think brain cancer. And that's like kind of the web MD thought, like, you know,

you look up a sniffle and all of a sudden you're going to have explosive diarrhea. Like that's not true. So it's just a precaution and they've actually lowered the range of prolactin on some labs. So it will show up high no matter what. And it's just something to keep an eye on. But it's always better safe to be sorry. And a lot of those things, like I said, are benign. You can take a pill, get rid of it, like cabergoline or something. We've talked a little bit about labs.

Like what do you actually send out for labs? And what are you tracking on there? I assume it's a little bit deeper than just getting a number of testosterone and a better way to find like a complete picture. What tests do you send out? So I don't personally, because I'm not a practitioner, like a medical practitioner, but now with the technology of being able to do it online, like there's a few different sites that you can have somebody order the requisition, get sent to their house. If you live in like New York, which is horrible. New York's the worst. God, we get stuff sent back from New York all the time. Why? If you live in New York, just make friends with somebody who lives in Pennsylvania or Connecticut.

Like that's your best bet. Um, and there's a couple other states, I think New Jersey and Rhode Island. But other than that, if you don't live there, you can pretty much order almost any test. And in addition to the specialty tests, like some of the gut tests, the micronutrient tests, some of the urine-based tests and stuff like that, I don't go that deep right off the bat. Usually people have a hard enough time just getting basic sex hormones like testosterone, SHBG, free testosterone, vitamin D, and then just the CBC and stuff. That's really where I want them to start just to see what baseline is because they've never even had labs. There there's people in their forties. They never had labs ever. I mean,

it's a, it's a, it's a luxury of life. If you can afford them, they're not, it's not able to read them to, to know somebody that can actually get in and do the diet or like understand what it all says.

That's like few and far between. There's just not many people that can actually do that, that, that have that skill. What's SHBG? Sex hormone binding globulin so uh testosterone and estrogen will bind to that so it's just important to get because if someone's on like a low carb diet or keto diet that generally will be high and be a reason that some of their

free tests um and or estrogen is bound to that but but like with the reading of it too, I learn more every day. I learn more about what I don't know every day too. I luckily have various doctors that I can talk to about this stuff. But a lot of coaches will be like, oh, what can I do to learn how to read labs? And I'm like, you got to spend 10 years, do what you're doing, Anders, where you just go through the process. You spend money, go through the process, and then learn how people interpret it to you, and then learn on yourself. I think the best way to learn is going through it by yourself, because then you are in tune with how you feel. So then you can put the puzzle pieces together. Yeah. You know, like talk a little bit, you know, I'm going to interview you now. Talk a little bit

about what you've experienced, you know, and that you totally were like, okay, I kind of knew this, but I didn't realize like this was a thing. Yeah. I mean, I feel fine. I feel great. Actually. I don't have it. Like the only thing that I feel like I need to really improve is my sleep. And it's because I have a newborn. So it's been a rough five months. Um, but when I got the results back on everything, I was blown away at how many things I like really need to dial into like coffee intake. I knew that I drank a lot of coffee, but you don't know what that does to your cortisol levels. You don't know what that does. Like when you're the exact opposite, the cortisol is at its highest right before you go to bed and wake up just in in the dumps like that's wild um the the

bacterial infections in my gut were very very shocking uh because i i feel fine i don't have any um i don't have any like ibs i don't have any i don't have any like of the symptoms i feel great i feel like my my strength numbers are relatively similar to when I was training really, really hard. So that stuff was just – I don't think it's the same as like catching cancer early. But like, yeah, what happens like when you're five years down the road or how long have I been dealing with it? Maybe three, five, ten years. I don't know. I don't know where it all showed up.

But what happens if that continues and my immune system continues to be working in such a deficit that like, even when I'm sleeping, it's fighting this bacterial infection in my gut that I have no idea. So I can't even go and produce testosterone. No wonder I popped as low

because all night long, these little critters are in there trying to sabotage my life. Back up. Let my immune system function like it's supposed to so I can get the tea I need. I feel like without going and doing all of it, I would have just been like, oh, well, the doctor said I'm good. Here's my blood work. The doctor said I'm good. They say the same thing about my cholesterol, but nobody ever talks about the ratio of my LDL to total cholesterol.

And that's actually fine. No doctor's ever said that. But there's just pieces to the testing process that like – it's like we check this box. Is that a symptom or is that a root cause? Most likely, the first three levels of whatever's going on is just a symptom of something. And it's like the problems just like fan out as you start to dig into them. The nutrition protocol that I'm on right now, actually, I feel like it's one of the hardest things that I've –

I've never had something that I've tried to follow so specifically, but I feel like my weight has become stabilized a little bit in this part of what I'd like to be doing towards goals. But my sleep's been a lot better eating a specific way. Imagine that. That's weird. And I mean, I realize that you're probably going to do a more in-depth separate podcast on all of that, but just going through the process can be eye-opening and even more so for somebody who had zero symptoms. Cause like you said, the problem is 10 years down the road, if your immune system is compromised,

that's when the bad shit starts to happen. That's when the cancer gets detected. That's when stuff doesn't, you know, it's like, how did this happen? And there's no explanation in a healthy individual. And that's when it happens is immune system compromised, whatever the word is, but testosterone helps that. So when guys are operating with low testosterone, they don't have their full immune defense either. Yeah. I think the really big thing, especially when it it comes to like current day things going on, like the news will sit there and yell like this many people are dying of COVID. The ICU is full. It's like, well, why? Well, most people are obese. You go, oh, well, obesity and this relate. And now your immune system's jacked. It's like, well, yeah, but if we could put like an objective number

to the function of your immune system and how well it's operating and say, for me, I came back at like 65 out of 100. 65%, I feel like I'm a gangster. Like I fight off anything. I never get sick. But imagine if you're 40 pounds overweight. Imagine you have five, six bacterial infections in your gut that are showing up as like, you know, countless things that it could be. you have five, six bacterial infections in your gut that are showing up as like,

you know, countless things that it could be. And then, Doug, and then all of a sudden, you get hit with COVID. That's what it really means to have a compromised immune system. It doesn't mean obesity. Well, obesity and COVID might be linked together, but what actually is happening because you're obese? Your immune system is working a billion miles an hour trying to just find homeostasis and live. Just be. Can we just try to get through a day without more shit attacking us? And then you go, oh, well, if 60% of my immune system is fighting off a bunch of crap in my gut, and then I got this obesity thing where I'm just running on overdrive all day long, just trying to get through all these calories and burn whatever fat is there so I can walk and survive. You realize now COVID hits it, you got 8% left. You got 8% of your immune system to

go fight one of the deadliest viruses that's ever hit the world. It's like, oh, now I see the correlation where even before I did all the testing, it was like, oh, you should just lose weight. That should be the thing. I never actually saw what the immune system looks like, where it spends most of its energy, how those bacterial infections affect your total health. And if you look at your immune system as an objective number, now all of a sudden you go, oh, well, I've got 35% going to fight this strep that's in my gut. Oh, I got to figure that out. I got to figure that out because that's a lot. I don't want to be 65% of my life life working in a deficit.

Then you go, well, how much do I have left? How much of that energy in the middle of the night when I'm supposed to be producing testosterone, when I'm supposed to be sleeping well, when I'm supposed to be going through this fat-burning process and revving up for the day and doing this diagnostic systems check that your body goes through each night, where's all that energy going? You go, well, your body just doesn't have enough of the good stuff because it's fighting these creepy little bacterias in your gut right now. That was the most eye-opening thing for me of like you don't have the ability to optimize your own health because you've got this hidden crap going on that you just isn't even presenting itself yet.

And how many people you think are walking around and have no idea? Just go to the airport. It's a disaster. The airport is like the carnival of humanity. It's disgusting. Every time we go to Disney, I'm like, I don't know. I, they're not, they're not at 65%. I promise. But now that you've done all these tests, it's like, it, do you sit back and wonder like, okay, how can everybody not go through this stuff and not find out this stuff? Unfortunately, I'm going to dump like an, in my entire savings account into getting my family tested too, because I can't, it's like, once you do it and seriously, people like send me an email, like send me an email. I will tell you why this is so important.

If this isn't enough. Um, I, I feel like I possess information that it's unfortunate that most people will not be able to afford, will not have the lifestyle systems built in, will not have the support systems to be able to do it successfully, nor do they have the, like, I've been training 25 years to get to this point to understand how deep this conversation actually needs to go.

And, like, it was, like, getting the results back was kind of like this turning point of like, oh, oh, we like – we have to go there. We can get people lean. We can get them strong. We figured out all the mechanisms to build muscle and all this stuff. But so much of life is just about like hitting walls and then figuring out like, why, why did I hit this wall? Why do I keep hitting this wall over and over again? And then 25 years later, I'm not even hitting a wall. I don't even feel the wall, but I'm like pushing up against stuff that I don't, I don't even, it's hidden. I don't see it. I don't know it's there. And then you get the results

back and you go, Oh, there it is. There's the thing. And Now I know this is a problem. Now I know that we have to go fix it. And now I understand that there's a way, way deeper level to this thing. Big time. And it makes you realize too, like, oh, we throw a lot of supplements at a lot of things blindly. Well, I actually really want to ask you that too. Like what is the supplementation? Because I have my own Travis, peace out, mash elite.com. Get after it. Go get Jack with our boy national champion two years in a row. You got to go work on it, right? He's got to go run, run some cause. What, um, do you do supplementation specific to testosterone? How do you view supplementation? I view it very basic. So the thing is, when I have a consult with somebody or I start coaching

somebody, they're already very overwhelmed with a lot of things that they didn't realize they had to address. So I don't want to continuously add to that. So I start them off with the basics in which are in my mind, a high quality multivitamin, creatine, vitamin D, fish oil. And then if they have some sleep issues, maybe some sleep stuff, but usually that alone is like 10 times more than they've been taking, or they've been taking like one a day or something like from the drugstore or gummies or something, which are really big right now. And so I think a high quality fish oil is one of the most underrated things that somebody can take because it really hits like inflammation.

It could hit blood sugar issues. Otherwise, everything's kind of blind. And I'm just assuming somebody based on their food log, they're not getting enough of the nutrients that you'll find in a high quality multi. So this is another fun piece of the nutrition side of it to me is like, even the idea of macros seem relatively, it's not the importance of them, but my view on them on the importance level, the value that view on them on the like importance level the value that i give to macros has decreased significantly and like the framework that i view food now is because of this program that we're on is i'm stacking micronutrients in my body in a specific order that my body needs them. And I'm eating a much wider range of foods. And what was prescribed to me to eat was the exact opposite of everything I

have been eating, which is typically like beef, like ground beef, steak, eggs. I'm a very like cow person. It's like the most delicious one. So I eat a lot of cows. I think chicken breast sucks unless it's like done very, very well, which is hard, especially for like meal prepping. But now because it's like, well, if I go eat more pork or if I eat more chicken, like what micros are coming in and how do I stack this stuff in my gut so that the actual nutrients that are getting out to my body are the things that I need at the specific time of the day to have whatever hormonal reaction and chemical reactions go the way that they need

to go to optimize my own health. That's been a tricky thing over the last couple of weeks for me, to be honest with you, because it's like that, that, yeah, that's gotta be one of the most like tedious mental energy type of things because you really have to, you know, get it on point for the goal that you're on with that type of nutrition program. People don't know that people don't know how food works. They don't know what a protein is. They don't, they, you know, like they're like, Oh, Nutella. Nutella has hazelnuts. That must be good fat. Yeah.

Yeah. It's confusing. And this is honestly why I think there's a big uprise like liver king and stuff like that. Oh, my God. Organ meats are actually, they have a lot of nutrients. Now, his supplement line, I will have people, because Dave Lee got me onto this, taking like the organ meats in addition to the multivitamin, because I'm not going to eat liver and I'm not going to eat raw testicle as much as people send that to me all day. I'm just not going to eat it. So I will take it in capsule form

because you can get a shit ton of nutrition through that. But the way our farming system and agriculture has changed, as you guys very well know, just because it says grass fed, that could have been 30 seconds like here, cow, eat some grass, or then we're bringing you back in. So unless you know the farmer, you know, it's a local place that finishes them on grass, then it's almost like that whole organic argument with all that. It's tough to have. I used to be that trainer that was like, you must buy wild caught and organic and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, who am I to create these barriers that could be particularly financial to somebody

to people, you know? So now I'm like, just get the protein. Like, okay. If you have fruit that doesn't have skin on it, that's probably something that we want to get that's not sprayed in pesticide. But when it comes to like getting your protein, if you can order it online and get like, you know, some organ blends and stuff, cool. If you know the farmer, even cooler. But otherwise, like get the grocery store brand because it really doesn't matter because we don't really know. Yeah. The thing with the supplement piece that's also changed a lot because our supplementation program is super specific. And there's a six month like wellness piece to it. And then month two, three, and four of that program are specific to putting the micronutrients into your body that

specifically kill the strep that's in my gut. And then once it's dead, then replenishing it and then creating like a very healthy wellness plan around it. So, so that like six or 12 week period, 13 week period in there is like the meat of it with an entire wellness program built around it to like support it over the entire six months. What has been interesting about me is I now have created, not created, but the framework that I like view supplements through is like, there's like the multivitamin approach. And then there's like the, yo, we know exactly what's going on. We know the exact micronutrients you need to go kill this specific thing, then replenish it with the,

like the, the good bacteria that we need in your gut. That way we create a, a, we leave your gut in a better place. Not just then when we started, but in it as optimal of a place as it can possibly be the micro or the like multivitamin for all of it, I'm like super on board with all that. Most people can't go and do what we're doing. So taking some sort of multivitamin approach of like, well, I need some ashwagandha, I need some whatever the testosterone things are, vitamin D, zinc, some magnesium, like put it all in a big pill let's do it i'm down it's gonna help um is it gonna get you like 300 points probably not but let's it's like support a natural

system and then the other side is well if you're really gonna go do this thing you really want to see the power of what supplements can do and i haven't even started my plan so i'm excited to like really dig into it and see how it feels and what happens is each micronutrient can be purchased at a specific dosage to solve a specific problem and have a specific outcome. If you do it the right way, you just have to have the knowledge and a coach that's capable of getting you to go that knows how physiology and biology works so well that they can actually prescribe it in the way that it should be prescribed. Yeah. That's why it's tough with a lot of these supplement companies who just kind of take coaches as affiliates and ambassadors with no qualifications

whatsoever, because you do need a solid understanding of biochemistry because so many supplements can interact with medications. They can interact with each other. And having that base is so pertinent. And again, when you do specific testing like you did, that's like the holy grail. That is the fun stuff because then you know exactly what to take. And the cool thing is that talking about this, you're talking about the micronutrients for your gut and people are so obsessed with probiotics.

They don't even do stool testing to know what probiotic, but they don't know that it really does come down to a lot of the micronutrients that we're not getting. That's really going to support that. Yeah. The, uh, yeah, you mentioned kombucha. There's, you know, in order for, uh, It's such a weird thing because I hear people talk about it or your friends will say like, oh, well, is kombucha good? And you go, yeah, it's awesome. I totally feel like you should also play in the dirt and maybe put dirt in your

mouth or something. I don't know. it's all good it's got healthy bacteria it's natural like get after it um is it specific to like n equals one not everybody can do that so there has to be some sort of and i i think it's easy to hate on the supplement industry because of what you're talking about like yeah i've got the affiliate code. I'll hook you up. I don't care if it's right. I'm going to get my 15%. That's great. Like that is a thing, but the multivitamin approach has to, it does have its place for so many people and it can really help them. It can, it can like tilt the scales over a long period of time in your direction. How long it's really up to you and your lifestyle. If you're eating like shit,

it's not going to help at all. But if you, if, yeah, it'll help get you where you need to go faster. But if you want the gangster approach, you need to do the work. And you got to find someone that can do everything you need to do. I wish more people would do that. I've had very few clients that have gone through that type of specific testing. But there's a lot of people that will, and they just need the right person who can kind of bring them through that. Yeah. Yeah. Before we wrap, I want to hear more about the curriculum for testosterone schools. That's what you're calling it, right? Yeah. What's that full curriculum look like? And how did you choose to design it the way that you did? So my problem when I always create my lectures and talks is continually trying to make things simple because I overcomplicate it in my head with everything. But also I am not talking to

the normal people that are arguing about this testosterone stuff all day long. I'm talking to coaches. I'm talking to Gen Pop. I'm talking to my clients. I am talking to people who just want an understanding of, all right, what do I have to talk to my doctor? How do you know who the right doctor is? And what do I really need to know about myself as a man health-wise? So I was like, what are the big rocks that come up usually? It's the talk around prostate cancer and prostate health. So I have a specialist for that, that I'm interviewing, Dr. Jordan Grant. He's great. He'll cover that module because I'm obviously not someone who would consider themselves a urologist or expert on prostate cancer and health.

So the cardiovascular link, people think that testosterone causes heart attacks and stuff. So we have to address that. The difference between different anabolic steroids and testosterone. Are there any that are safe to add on? Because that is a real world thing. No one talks about it openly. Let's have an open conversation about what you can take and how and what dosage and what that means for you side effect wise. So those are some of the bigger topics. Estrogen, blocking estrogen. Why do so many practitioners block estrogen? And why is it necessary to have estrogen as a man? Why don't you want to block it? The rabbit hole with that.

But before that, it's really the basic physiology of like your HBTA axis. What is testosterone? What is the effect it has on the body? What are the lab ranges now? Why do men need it? What does it do for them? And then what do we do lab work wise? What do we ask for? What are we looking for from that standpoint? The sexual health, so sexual function, erections, all that stuff, all that fun stuff that guys may not ask or they'll ask in a private message and they don't really have

information on. So any side effects if there are, what to expect if you do want to go on testosterone replacement and why it's okay and why it doesn't make you less of a man and why it's completely normal thing for most men these days. And then also the crisis, like the modern fertility and low testosterone crisis, what caused it and going into endocrine disrupting chemicals, xenoestrogens, all that stuff, the feminization of men. I touch on that as well. I have my outline too. I have a whiteboard outline, the whole thing. I literally have changed it 14 different times, but now it's pretty solid. And then nutrition and training. So what do I do nutrition-wise? What are the big rocks? How do I train? And all of that. So I'm going to try to make it as simple

as possible so it's digestible and then maybe have a 2.0 version for some of the even more advanced stuff but right now there's really like there's resources for guys to to learn this stuff but a lot of it is at a level that they don't really speak yet so it's okay can i just learn like the basics and then go into some of the advanced stuff cool and then places that they can go if they do want to get tested or work with a telemedicine practitioner, stuff like that. Beautiful. Yeah. That's the consensus. When are you planning on launching this?

January. So I said winter because I was like, maybe by December, but then as it kept growing, I was like, yeah, no. The never ending project you created for yourself. Oh my God. It's just endless. Cause then you think of like, well, people are like,

well, what about blood donation? I get advised to do blood donation. I'm like, okay, let's add that to the list. Like stuff like that, you know?

So I have to be okay with good enough, you know? And then it's like, no matter what, no matter how much I put into this, I'm still going to say, oh, I should have added that.

Yeah. Um, I love hanging out. Thanks for coming back. Where can people find you and testosterone school? So you guys can find me on Instagram at the Allie Gilbert, A-L-I Gilbert. And then my website, which is alliewinegroff.com. You can find a email list for testosterone school. Cause I will have a presale for that probably around black Friday. And that will be all in, in emails that, uh, have to do with testosterone school and the launch and all that.

So that would be the place. Make sure you get over, hang out with Travis mash, mash elite performance, mash elite.com. Uh, Doug Larson. You bet. My Instagram, Douglas. Doug Larson. You bet.

I'm on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. All right, thanks for coming on the show. Glad we got to do this again so quickly. I missed it last time, so it was fun to hang out today. Stoked to see testosterone in school when it comes out. Sounds rad. Thank you, guys. Thank you guys so much.

This is so much fun. I could sit here for hours. I know. I didn't even realize. I didn't even have the clock up. We went like 25 minutes longer than I expected. So fantastic. Awesome. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to DieselDadMentorship.com. That's where all the busy dads are other humans, we're in the biggest Walmarts near you.

So that's a super center. That's anywhere that has more than your neighborhood Walmart, the little one. No one likes that marketplace Walmart. Go to the big one. Go to the performance nutrition section. That's where we're at. Three programs on the shelf,

and you are going to see my face on all three of them. That means you're in the right spot. Beautiful little partnership with New Vitality, and it's really cool. 2,200 Walmarts. So go go to your local one friends. We'll see you guys next week.